Here Right Now

Everyone needs to know about rewilding, in my opinion.

Rewilding is an evocative concept. Notions of the good old days! A lush and lively community of species going about their business undeterred, swapping planes in the sky for a cornucopia of birds and bees, and on the ground, boar, bears, bison, wolves and maybe beaver too. Not just a return, but perhaps a new accommodation - humans and the rest of the ecosystem in balance. Rewilding. It sounds cool.

Pandemic and lockdowns created space and caught imaginations. In the absence of other distractions, we town and city-dwellers started noticing the birds in our gardens, while in Barcelona the city’s boar population is out of control and in Wales mountain goats invaded a town. And lots of us have heard about the rare species that have returned to Chernobyl of all places, and how the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone Park unlocked an amazing cascade of ecosystem improvements. ‘Nature is healing’ was the optimistic meme.

Derek Gow has spent a lifetime caring for, cultivating and reintroducing species in the UK. A farmer and a conservationist, and now author of the funny, irreverent and moving book ‘Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man's Quest to Rewild Britain's Waterways’, he tells it how he sees it.

Gow knows what rewilding takes. He’s spent decades doing it. Fighting red tape and the affluent countryside lobbies. Breeding and introducing delicate creatures through trial and error. As an authority and a practitioner, Derek can share an accurate and grounded point of view about how real rewilding is or isn’t, how pressing the need is and what the major barriers are to making better, faster progress, today.

In this conversation you’ll learn about keystone species, about why the beaver is so surprisingly impactful on its ecosystem, you’ll hear about the white-tailed eagles ‘the size of a flying barn door’ being reintroduced across the UK, you’ll get a clear sense of how you can support rewilding efforts and loads more. And you’ll enjoy Derek’s fluent, fiery, no-nonsense account.

Links

* Derek Gow - Twitter

* Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man's Quest to Rewild Britain's Waterways by Derek Gow (book on Amazon)

* Beavers on the River Tamar, Devon (opens PDF)

* White-tailed Eagle reintroduction - Roy Dennis Foundation

* Knepp - ground-breaking rewilding project in Sussex, UK

* Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree (book on Waterstones)

* Further listening #8: Understanding our plants and fungi with Dr Ilia Leitch

Credits

* Music by Lee Rosevere

Automated transcript

Will McInnes 0:00

So did you did you get an eagle today?

Derek Gow 0:04

I've not been anywhere near the farm today I've been up looking at another project and Bridgewater nowhere near that goodness knows hopefully but I won't see till tomorrow

Will McInnes 0:15

right Where's Bridgewater in the world?

Derek Gow 0:18

Somerset so when I'm looking at we rewire a rewilding project on a farm there lots of people really interested in smaller areas of land taking smaller areas of land 120 acres or something like that and looking at how you restore it for nature so was up seeing charming couple who run our you know, organic fruit and vege operation there and already have an area which is incredibly rich and wildlife Big Finish flocks, like so which I haven't seen for years, I say the game leading areas, and then it's just down to the, the crops and the seeds and the untidiness of it all. And because you've got that you've got nature, it's not very complicated.

Will McInnes 1:04

I love it. I love it. That's so so fantastic. I'd love to just start by introducing you and saying, you know, welcome,

Unknown Speaker 1:14

you're,

Will McInnes 1:15

I've been really inspired following you have read your book recently. And on the book sleeve, it describes you as a farmer and a conservationist is that is that the feel like the right kind of label for you?

Derek Gow 1:27

And yeah, I don't see any contradiction between the two things. To be quite honest, this idea there in amicable is just nonsense. At the end of the day, if you farm wisely with our main to other life, you can do much. So I see no contradiction in that.

Will McInnes 1:43

Just to get us going, you know, my experiences. I'm a lay person I'm I have had a kind of nerdy, but amateurish fascination with birds of prey. My recent story, which would be, you know, the pandemic, being stuck at home, becoming obsessed with the bird feeder in the garden, and you see these kind of memes of nature is healing. And someone ended up recommending a nap to me, and I live in Brighton. I'm speaking to you now from Brighton, that you're down in the West Country in Devon.

Unknown Speaker 2:17

That's right. Yeah.

Will McInnes 2:18

I've got myself over to nap. And we did the data with my two boys who are just early teens and hearing about every species of bat and Owl and rare species of visiting birds and solitary bees. And from there, I found my way to you and your exploits on Twitter and, and your book. And, you know, I would love to hear a short kind of potted history of your story. How did you get to be doing this work?

Derek Gow 2:43

When I was very small, I became involved with the rare breed survival trust, I always had some pet sheep at home, where I live in a town in the Scottish Borders, called beggar. And when I think I was about maybe 10. Somebody gave me a Shetland sheep as a pet. No, at that time, these old breeds of livestock were very rare. I mean, they were very uncommonly kept. And you drive through landscapes and just not see any flocks of colour cheap, or Longhorn cattle or anything like it. And so when I was given this, I think also they gave me a book for my birthday about, you know, these old but it was written by a chap called john Vince, about the old breeds of domestic livestock, their history, that confinement to the Western Isles, or, you know, in the case of white Park capital, the containment and the last of the hunting parks. And when you start to read the stories of these remarkable creatures, you know, you're basically on VR unravelling a tapestry of British history. And I became very interested in that and then I, I graduated, you know, from that to, you know, reading Gerald Donald's books and his expeditions and South America and all the colourful characters he met and entailed, and his say, in a search for, for animals to bring back for zoos. And then later in his life, obviously he, he turned to the idea that zoos could be so much more than they should be ARKS, saving creatures for a better future, and then restoring them when when the world was a better place. So I mean, that's really what inspired me at the beginning. It was nothing complicated. It wasn't a university education, or anything like it. I left school when I was 17, to work in agriculture for five years. And when I was made redundant at the end of that, then, I was offered the opportunity to, to manage a collection of rare breed domestic livestock in a place called palace, Rick Country Park on the outskirts of Glasgow. I did that for a number of years. As I was doing it, they asked me if I wanted to manage the zoo. And I did that so I came to work with a very broad range of British and European wildlife species in captivity. And was asked to understand how you read them how you maintain them effectively. And from that point, I guess, somewhere in the region of 30 years ago, the idea that some of these could be reintroduced a time when the world was better, which we don't seem to have quite achieved yet. Was was was was born and I became involved with waterfalls and beavers and I'm now working on wild cats and other species with a view to reintroducing them back into parts of the law strange.

Will McInnes 5:33

So, so cool, and I know that people listening will already be really dialled in to what you're saying. Like just the fact that you're now helping to introduce and work with wild cats is just incredibly exciting. So according to the list that I've put together, you've bred wild cats, white storks, European field hamsters, harvest mice, night, herons, stoats, water shrews. polecats.

Derek Gow 6:02

Yeah, I m

Cities are ‘serendipity engines’ and ‘social super colliders’ as well as vital places that we live, according to our expert guest Jenni Lloyd - but are the operating models used to deliver our city services and governance fit for a world of continued social change and austerity in public spending? Instead, how can we build better communities and places?

"Austerity has dictated that there's scarcity, but actually there's almost an infinite abundance within communities, and the local authorities that have realized that have taken a very different approach"

In her work recently at the innovation foundation NESTA, thinker, advisor and strategist Jenni and her team published the six part New Operating Models for Local Government. Behind the scenes they spoke with frontline innovators finding new interesting ways to deliver public services in cities, many in communities the North of England, who have been collaborating to develop new responses based on fundamental questions like “What is the contract between the city and the citizen?” and “What is a good place, what is a good life?”, linking together ‘anchor institutions’ like local hospitals, police and other social services in helpful new ways.

By the end of this conversation you’ll be looking at your own cities as serendipity engines, as networks, as a holistic system and above all as places changing, right now.

Links

* Jenni Lloyd - Twitter

* New Operating Models for Local Government - NESTA

* ShareTown - NESTA interactive visual map with real examples of city innovation

* Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) - short video

Credits

* Music by Lee Rosevere

Automated transcript

So Jenni, you have a great history. And it would be brilliant, if you could just share, not the hour, the hour long version, but the which you warned it could take which, but if you could give us a brief potted history of Jenni Lloyd maybe starting from the beginning,

Jenni Lloyd 2:26

at the very beginning, 1968, I did a fine art degree. And I went to art college, and primarily to leave home and spent three years making things and with varying degrees of success. And then I left art college with a degree in fine art, which isn't a particularly saleable commodity. And I found my way to Brighton kind of randomly, because I wanted to not go home to where my parents live, because it's very boring. And I didn't want to stay where it was, because it's boring. So I came to Brighton, and I'm still in Brighton. So Brighton is important to me. But um, I think my first job out of college was cleaning toilets on the pier. And, and so I had no idea what I wanted to do, I had no idea what was available to me. And looking back at it. And I had had some stupid ideas like this whole thing about truth to materials and how I wouldn't use computers. And bearing in mind, obviously, that this is almost kind of before the internet. But, um, that kind of fell by the wayside when I got involved in. Again, just kind of serendipitously, like, randomly, I started using computers, because I was working for the local newspaper to process images. And I realised that a lot of the kind of artwork that I was still making, which is all kind of collage II, based that I could actually do in Photoshop. And, and that led me into years worth of kind of digital design and production. And, and I think I've always thought that my works followed the, the, what's the word, evolution of the web? So initially, just about interfaces. So how do people use things? And how can I make them do the thing that we want them to do online? And then kind of it got more social? And that that was really interesting, because then we started thinking about well, how to how do these things that we're using digitally, and map into what we do collectively anyway, so how to communities work, and how can we provide online spaces where people can behave as communities, and what does that mean for businesses? So you were there for that? And so it meant a lot for businesses. And I think I look back on in those early days of naivety about what we thought the social web might engender, with obviously no knowledge of where we would end up in terms of, you know, kind of Cambridge analytic or, and all those sorts of things. But we did have a notion that digital stuff would be massively impactful in terms of society and politics and relationships between individuals and businesses, and all that sort of thing. And when obviously, we were thinking that it would have a largely positive effect, and had no insight into what the kind of negative effects would be. Anyway, so I spent years as a kind of digital designer, producer, then user experience designer, and then eventually as a kind of consultant for organisations that were trying to make themselves more fit for a digital world. And so it's funny because digital transformation now has, you know, like a legacy in history. But at the time, those were new terms, I think social media was new term, when we were first working in it, there was debate over whether that was actually the right term, and it seems extraordinary now. But anyway, so things like the cluetrain manifesto were really important. And the way that we were trying to run ourselves democratically was really important and aligned to the way that we thought the web was going to make the world. And it felt like an opportunity to change the world. But and, but to do it through business, and, and the web. And so that was obviously enormously exciting. And not necessarily Well, you know, successful in terms of kind of growing a big business or whatever. But it certainly led me down really interesting routes, in terms of human behaviour, and the intersection between how we work together, collectively, but also how the internet kind of affects that. And so

over a period of time, I decided to shift from thinking about business and innovation, and all those kind of fairly logical, hard terms and thinking about how does, how do you use those tools to change society. And sounds quite grand and aspirational, I have say, none of this was a plan, it will just emerged. And the more I've kind of come to think about what I do and how I do it, the more interested I become an emergence. And the less I believe in plans, that won't be a surprise to you, but I don't really believe that plans are real. They're just an aspiration. So emergence actually kind of makes sense to me. So over time, I started thinking about how do we live? And where do we live? And how can you change how we live and where we live, to create better outcomes. And, and I became interested in the concept of eudaimonia, which is a Greek word, which I find difficult to spell. And but it means a sort of state of human flourishing. And as soon as I kind of read about that concept, I just thought, yeah, that's what I'm interested in, is, how does all this stuff that we do together in the world? How does it create a state of flourishing? And the more I think about it, the more obvious it's aligned to, to to ecology as well. And because humans can't flourish, if they totally f**k up the place that they live in, so, so yeah, a state of human flourishing is actually a state of kind of planetary flourishing as well.

Will McInnes 8:37

That's a lovely, it's a lovely intro and a lovely set up. And so more recently, this concept of eudaimonia, is that how you say,

Jenni Lloyd 8:48

I don't know, I say it the way I read it,

Will McInnes 8:50

eudaimonia, it starts with the letters, E, you if you're if you're typing it in right now. So that really resonated for you. And that's about a kind of holistic sense of flourishing. And then I know that you have a particular interest in how this happens around place, or around cities. So to just just tell it, take that little thread and run with it go there.

Jenni Lloyd 9:17

So we all live in places, and I live in a place. And I'm really interested in this place in Brighton. And it's partly obviously because I live here, and so I know it well. And, and also I've interacted with lots of different parts of it. And like kind of physically, but also the people who live in it, the different communities that live in it, and I can't care about it, so and so if that makes it more interesting, but also it's the right size. So at one point when I when I decided to shift from working in kind of corporate land, I knew that I wanted to work on place, and that the best place I could work on was the place that I lived in that I knew the best and that I cared about the most So I started my own, kind of, I hesitate to call it consultancy, like formerly it was, you know, it was registered with companies house and I paid tax and things like that. But actually, it was an experiment. So I set it up as a kind of one year experiment, I knew it wasn't going to have longevity, I was never going to try and employ people and things like that. And it was a mechanism for me to shift fields. So to shift from kind of corporate consulting into social innovation, and play space, social innovation, so I did some work for

Fighting Covid-19 on the frontlines to save critically ill patients - what must that be like? As an NHS doctor in the UK seconded to emergency intensive care wards, Dr Dominic Pimenta was right there as the first tidal wave broke over London, UK.

And with that began a mission, first by founding a charity to equip his fellow healthcare professionals with the support and resources they needed. And now by pursuing the misinformation swirling around the topic, misinformation potentially as deadly as the virus itself with the ability to cause of many hundreds of thousands more deaths.

In this fascinating conversation, we hear Dr Dom’s first-hand perspective on the rapidly evolving reality of public health through this pandemic. From the visceral, practical reality of ‘charging through corridors’ setting up new intensive care wards and the emotions from discharging the first recovered patients, into the curiosity of the human condition - why do not just laypeople but also medics, scientists and even epidemiologists find themselves falling for the allure of misinformation.

Links

* Dr Dominic Pimenta - Twitter

* Healthcare Workers Foundation - charity.

* Modern Society Initiative - thinktank.

* Duty of Care - Dom’s latest book, ‘a tense and gripping account of the unfolding pandemic from a doctor who was there’. With all royalties going to the HWF charity.

Credits

* Big thank you to Jonny Sawyer for introducing Dom

* Music by Lee Rosevere 

Automated transcript

Will McInnes 0:00

I am very excited to be here today with Dr. Dom or Dominic Pimenta, who is a doctor but also wears quite a few different hats. so dumb. You're a doctor in your day job. You're the chair of the healthcare workers foundation. Yeah. A director of the modern society initiative. and author of duty of care.

Dr Dominic Pimenta 0:23

That's right. Yeah, that's all. Good. I suppose they can. They can. Yeah.

Will McInnes 0:30

And other responsibilities? Our Yeah. Let's just park the family. And other I guess if we start at the beginning, like with all good stories, how did you end up becoming a doctor? Like, what's your path?

Dr Dominic Pimenta 0:45

Well, I like to tell you that there's some sort of fictional childhood event where somebody was sick. And then the doctor came out nicely, it's really boring. I can't honestly remember why I wanted to be a doctor, I can't remember ever not wanting to be a doctor. So it's like that. I don't have access to have the best. It's a weird thing for doctors that I don't have the best memory. So events that are five to 10 years old, I really sometimes really struggle. So I do wonder if there was something I remember looking out a window once and thinking, Oh, when I die, I don't have any money. This was this because what my family or christian right, so we talked about death and heaven all the time. So I had this idea that when I die, I can't take any money with me. So what's the point in money, which actually is a very bad attitude, I've only just realised that I have. And I need to talk out now because I've got kids. But at the time, I was like, oh, okay, so what will be useful? And then I had this idea vaguely that, you know, after we all die, maybe the people I looked after, or whatever, maybe that's why I don't know, it's very vague. But the really the honest answer is I don't remember. And I was always on this pathway, since I don't know, like five or six. And anybody would say, What do you want? Do you want to be a doctor, and I just, you know, pick my GCSEs A Levels and, and very foolishly applied to for medical schools assumed again, all of them didn't get into it. Now, I've got to tell you, I've got into one of them. And I just assumed I was gonna go to medical school. So I applied for medical school, went to the interview, didn't really prepare at all, and spent the night before the interview just going out with the other interviewees there because you know, this is gonna, I'm going to walk this. And then I sat down, and weirdly enough, I'd read about Oxbridge interviews, right. And I thought, because I came from a state schools, I had no idea. I didn't know anybody. They've been taught to Cambridge. And I read this thing that in Oxford interviews, they want you to be weird and wacky, and show all your different thoughts and make weird connections. But that's probably not the case for medical school interview. So I turned up, and they showed me these pictures, this is the like, thing, right? They showed me these pictures of different like anatomy, I think there's some cells, there's like lots of things that you would make sensible medical connections with. And then I really hadn't really prep very much and had no idea what most of the stuff was. So I made lots of weak connections. And like the last two or three, I actually run out of ideas as well. So I just like, they were like, why did you put these two together with Oh, they're both sort of brown. And they look to me, like, what's wrong with you? And I thought that would be quite abstract and quirky. And they thought that you have just ruined this interview for us. And you know, at the end, they were like, Okay, do you have any questions that are just asked you, and I'm here. And obviously, I didn't get in. And actually, that was quite interesting. For the first time I'd ever sort of thought, Oh, actually, this pathway is not going to work out. And I had a sort of existential crisis. And then very weirdly, on the day of eucast, I was only allowed to apply to one London medical school. And but obviously, because I came from the south coast, and my mom was like, if you go to London, you're gonna get stabbed. So you can only apply to one. And that doesn't make any sense, right? But anyway, that's what that's what that's actually what happened. And on the day of UK, some some Sunday Times list or something came out and then I Imperial was my choice for like, the whole time. And on that single day, I just changed my choice for no reason at all, other than I seen something on the internet about five minutes before from Imperial to UCL. And I got into UCL. And that's where my wife and you know, we have kids and you know, this is funny how life just flips like that. And yeah, and that's when I went to medical school and have a great time really is it's amazing, central London, very different. And then I six years and then so finished in 2012 and went to work in so me and my wife flux of LinkedIn applications together. So we went to work and what we thought was quite a small deanery in Oxford. But very weirdly, we didn't talk about the jobs that we would apply for, doesn't apply for nearly exactly the same jobs. So I actually did, we did the same jobs for two years. So I would do the job. I think I was first I would do it. And then she would be the next doctor following me. Which is really funny because we could be About the same people, right, and you know all the ins and outs when you come into the, into the department. So it was actually it's actually great. And then after two years, we came back to London. And then I became a heart doctor, and was a heart doctor from 2016. And in various London hospitals, up until basically September this year, so about two months ago.

Will McInnes 5:25

Love it, that's already a brilliant and interesting beginning, we're going to be talking about misinformation around COVID. And you've written this book, about your experiences on the frontline, as a doctor working in ICU. everyone listening to this will want to want to hear a little bit about that experience. So just give us a flavour of of what it was like whether it's through a story or whether it's just your overall experience. What was it like, being a doctor working on the frontlines of this pandemic?

Dr Dominic Pimenta 6:02

Yeah, I mean, the book decides to quit plug for the book there. So it's, um, it's called duty of care. And actually, if you get out before the 30th of November, it only 99 p on Kindle right now, and actually got, I'm currently in the charts. I'm 28. And Obama is 27. I don't know this Obama guy, the pandemic, I found myself weirdly across lots of different elements of it like right at the beginning. Me and my wife were really super anxious about it, thought it was going to be this catastrophic, global changing event. And then weirdly turned out to be pretty much right about that, which was the curveball, I think, no, everyone else thought that we were insane actually have to say for like four weeks. And there's this really horrible isolating period of going up to people saying, Ah, Covid is coming, have you done the numbers, we're gonna have thousands in it. And they were like, Nah, be okay. But you know, they're completely on the other side of this glass. And we'd already stepped through that, you know, into this weird world. And weirdly, for us, I suppose, when the lockdown came in, you know, and everyone, we were sort of on TV calling for early lockdown. And it's all very controversial. But a week later, there we are full lockdown. Everybody stay at home. It was weird. Like, I mean, lots people wouldn't be very anxious. But for us, it was a big relief, beca

How much of the world’s plants and fungi do we understand? Scratch that - how much of the world’s plants and fungi have we even discovered? And with that understanding, what is changing right now?

In this episode our special guest Dr Ilia Leitch of the world-renowned Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew helps us to explore and begin to understand the fascinating scientific frontiers and discovery underway in the natural world.

Kew - working with 210 contributors in 97 institutions across 42 countries - recently released its ‘State of the World's Plants and Fungi 2020’ report, and my conversation with Dr Leitch calls on some of the broad and fascinating findings in this globally important piece of work.

Listening to Dr Ilia you will find that we are living in a paradox.

While new discoveries are happening every day, with 1,942 species of plants and 1,886 species of fungi scientifically named for the first time in 2019, new insights and everyday applications being uncovered, and only a tiny fraction of the world’s fungi even identified, we are also facing awful, irrecoverable loss, with two in five of plant species threatened with extinction, a world where by the time a new species has been described and named it is often already facing extinction.

Despite that, Dr Leitch is optimistic and you will hear a hope grounded in pragmatism and science in her perspectives as we bounce from discovery and taxonomy to genomics (some really interesting parallels with software here for me), get a sense of the amazing ‘hidden kingdom of fungi’ and gain a better appreciation for the opportunities and challenges of international collaboration in science.

We can't save things if we don't know what's there. So we have to know what's there. And that's why what we do is important.

There’s also a nice link between ‘citizen science’ and some of the discussion with Eliot Higgins on crowdsourcing intelligence in Episode 4.

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did and get a better sense of our scientific understanding of plants, fungi and how they are affected by and adapting to this changing world. It really, really matters.

Links

* Dr Ilia J Leitch, Assistant Head of Comparative Plant and Fungal Biology Department and Senior Research Leader

* State of the World's Plants and Fungi 2020

Credits & Thanks

* Thank you Louise Brown for the introduction 🌟

* Thank you Anna Carlson for questions

* Lee Rosevere for music

Automated transcript

Will McInnes 0:46

So I'm really privileged to have you here with us today. Dr. Elliot Leach. And you are assistant head of comparative plant and fungal biology and a senior research leader at Royal Botanic Gardens. Kew. Is that correct?

Ilia Leitch 1:29

It is quite a mouthful. No, it is correct. It is quite a mouthful. I just think of myself as a very fortunate scientist to be working at Kew. So that's what you know, I have access to the wonderful collections at Kew that enable me to do really exciting well work that I think is exciting. And hopefully important. In the long run,

Will McInnes 1:53

when I was a little boy growing up in London, we went on a couple of school trips to to Kew, some people may not have been that lucky. So for the listener that hasn't come across. Kew Could you just tell us a little bit about either the history the purpose, like where, what what the project and the organisation and institution does today.

Ilia Leitch 2:16

Um, well, it's a has a very long history goes back 200 and more than 260 years. So as founded in 1759, if I'm correct, and really is a started off as, as a royal garden with the best sort of director of being interested in plants and plant diversity, and being able to name and collect things and by understand how they're used. And over the years, I guess Kew has had a long history of continue to collect lots of samples, and a great expertise in being able to correctly name them. So we have accused of amazing collections in the world of some of the largest collections in the world of plant herbarium specimens which reflect which are squashed plants effectively between paper but they provide an essential reference for being able to describe a plant species, a new plant species, as its described, will be made into a herbarium specimen. And the description of of all the attributes and characters, which describe that species and make it distinct from everything else will be captured in that specimen. So that's what in fact, that's what we call the type specimen it Kew because that's the actual individual plant that was used to name a species, we have lots of type specimens, but we have over over seven and a half million of these specimens in one of the buildings at Kew. And then we also have the equivalent for funghi, with over 1.2 5 million specimens of different funghi. All stored in different boxes, and again, their vital source of information for being able to correctly name things and of course, without a name, you are lost, because yes, the essential fundamental ability to communicate with people and to do to discuss things on an equal term. So I guess that those are two of our great collections that Kew and we have now around 300 scientists, thank you for working using those collections, as well as collaborating widely with partnerships across the world, doing biodiversity focused research. I mean, of course, I should also mention we have a public garden, which is the side that most of the people who come to Kew is what they will see. But and that's a wonderful sight as well in the sort of west of London where, you know, I love going out there when I'm not in the lab. It's a wonderful place. And but that's the science which really underpins it's more than a public more than just a pretty garden. It's it's a garden which uses all the plants first Science Research and for understanding, documenting and sort of utilising all the information that we have about plants and funding. Incredible.

Will McInnes 5:11

It brought so much to life, there's the pretty garden. But then there's this formidable body of 300 scientists, you know, and then these these immeasurably unique and important resources that you're leveraging. So that the, the, the archive, effectively the the data set. And so that's really, really useful and interesting. And I

Ilia Leitch 5:36

just had one thing is what's really exciting, particularly in a way is the fact that these collections, many of which are hundreds of you know, over 100 or 200 years old, were originally collected just as dried specimens. But now with the advances in DNA sequencing techniques, we're able to actually extract DNA from these samples. So we can use that for helping advance our understanding of plants and how they're related to each other, and funghi. And so we're using these collections that are being repurposed for new things that we never that when they were originally collected, nobody had any idea that they would be useful for that sort of research because they didn't know about DNA. But now you can get it out that we can get chemicals out of them, we can explore them for new potential drugs. Now, it's a whole new, so they're not dead and dried sort of collections sort of stuck in a dusty cupboard. They are, they are a vital resource for our research. So I just wanted to add that.

Will McInnes 6:34

No, that's wonderful. That's absolutely wonderful. And as a tangent, there's a guy that I follow on Twitter called Seamus blackly, who recently made a loaf of bread from yeast that he harvested from an Egyptian specimen a piece of terracotta or clay or something from from the time and I love that idea. It's like Jurassic Park, isn't it? It's the idea that you can use the things that seem like they're in spaces, the amber and the mosquito in it still contain the source code to so much interesting science. Thank you for bringing that to life for us. And so what's, how did you end up doing this kind of work earlier? People are always interested in the stories that our guests, you know, how we went these parts in life? Have you always been enthusiastic about the natural world? Like what what was the path?

Ilia Leitch 7:30

I've been Yes, I've always, I've always loved the natural world, and the complexity and diversity and the surprises that you never know what you're going to find. I love that sort of unknown and being able to find out for the first time something that nobody else in the world knows, and yet it contribute a vital piece of the puzzle to understanding things that are being studied. So I guess as always, I've always been curious about that. And yes, I've always liked the natural world. And I've particularly like plants. So my work is focused mainly on plants. But I like the fact that I can cue I can work on a whole diversity of plants, you know, we have around 350,000 different species of vascular plants. So those are things l

Today our special guest, my colleague and Forbes ‘25 Black Business Leaders To Follow’ Abadesi Osunsade, directs our attention towards an amazingly powerful, personal and precious capacity - our empathy.

‘What are the limits of empathy and compassion, and can we overcome them?’

Aba is VP of Global Community & Belonging at Brandwatch, host of the highly brilliant Techish podcast and CEO of Hustle Crew. Sourced from her hard work and bitter lived experiences having to fight for fairness and equity in the tech community, Aba’s framing question for our discussion gets to the very heart of a whole world of pain we’re experiencing today. It also opens the door to considering perhaps our largest scale opportunity as a species: greater empathy.

In 2020, I can’t think of a more timely and important topic.

When you look at the headlines, when you doom-scroll your social media, perhaps when you walk around your neighborhood or city center, what could the world look like if expanded our individual and collective empathy? Would we need to fight so hard for Black Lives Matter and #metoo? Would the onus be so squarely on those oppressed? Would there be a need for drug policy reform or gender pay gap measures? Would we be treating the planet and its living creatures in the way that we do?

And in the workplace too how can we find the capacity and tools to better empathize? Amongst pandemic, with frontline working in PPE and office jobs now Zoom-meetings-only, with trying to be a good citizen, family member, partner, worker, and stay healthy while the economy judders and everything is disrupted. With a global recalibration happening, a climate crisis burning?

Tune in - I promise you that the breadth of Aba’s knowledge and reading, the clarity of her point of view and the energy of her delivery will command your attention.

Links

* Abadesi on Twitter

* Hustle Crew - a career advancement community for the underrepresented in tech

* Techish podcast with Michael Berhane

Credits

* Lee Rosevere for music

Automated transcriptWill McInnes 00:01Aba Hello. Abadesi Osunsade 00:03Hey, how's it going? Will McInnes 00:05Good. How are you? Abadesi Osunsade 00:06Yeah, I'm really good. Thanks. Looking forward to our convo. Will McInnes 00:10Absolutely. So we've recently started working together. Abadesi Osunsade 00:14Yeah, colleagues Will McInnes 00:16colleagues. So good to say Good to have you on board and to be working together. I'm love your energy and everything you're about. Abadesi Osunsade 00:23Thank you. Yeah, it's also think I'm in like week, nine now or 10. It's going going very quickly. But it's awesome. Will McInnes 00:30And for those that don't yet follow you on Twitter, you're kind of chronicling the journey.Abadesi Osunsade 00:37Even filming offendWill McInnes 00:39me see, me too. So on Twitter, you are, I haven't got your Twitter handle here.Abadesi Osunsade 00:48@abadesi. My first name lastWill McInnes 00:51name. That's like getting the domain name. That's like, you've gotAbadesi Osunsade 00:56I do also have Abadesi.com. So yeah, IWill McInnes 00:59yeah. So @ ABADESI, and I, before you joined brandwatch. But when we were talking about it, I started listening to your amazing Techish podcast. And was just inspired by how you and your co host, Michael, just the energy I was I was doing. At the time, I'd be pedalling away on a bike or an indoor bike, like going up a hill or something. And it was just funny, lively, and caustic moments at times appropriately. So just capturing like, the, the tech news of the day or the week, and there's been, there's been so much isn't there?Abadesi Osunsade 01:49Yeah, there has been too much. I think it's really interesting, like reflecting on tech news, when might you yourself have been a victim of the negative trends that are sort of like playing out in the industry, whether that's, you know, the fact that Michael and I chose to bootstrap partly because we wanted to build a sustainable business, but also because it's black founders, it's so hard to access capital, and then finding out that there's like some closed beta in Silicon Valley, that's just raised 10 million with 2 million of that going straight into the founders pockets. And you're like, wait a closed beta. So how is that proven itself? So yeah, I think as we report on stories, through the lens of our experience and our identity, it can get quite emotional, because there's some really personal moments where you're like, Ah, so I see that there are exceptions to the rules out there.Will McInnes 02:36Big exceptions. And it's been a kind of delight in a weird way, although perhaps the circumstances are different to how we wish they were, but to see Techish rise up, like you're, you've built a community, and that's really obvious in social media. And then to be featured, I think you were featured by Apple on the homepage of their podcasts or something like top business podcasts or something.Abadesi Osunsade 03:06It's amazing. It's incredible. I mean, like all things kind of like a company or a piece of art is like super analogous to all of those things where it starts as an idea in your head. And suddenly, it's something real, that's actually one of the first things I took two jobs to co brandwatch about, because it's just like, Yeah, one day, you have an idea. And then, you know, x months or years later, it's like a thing out in the world. But yeah, like when you use hashtags on Twitter, which I do all the time, I'm not sharing about that, just to see what people are saying, or, and it really resonates with folks who are very interested in tech or participating in tech, but are frustrated with the dominant narratives in tech. You know, they're frustrated with this, like, you know, either like squeaky clean image of like building the future, or this like super like homogenous face of what tech represents people like Mark Zuckerberg, people like to face loss. And it just shows I feel like the trajectory of of tech and how it's grown, that there was an appetite for this perspective, and this voice, and I'm really, really glad that we can deliver it. And it's amazing to also see the number of other like black tech podcasts and other sort of like marginalised and underrepresented groups in tech also stepping out and having a voice because I think we really, really need to if we want things to, you know, be more representative of society in general.Will McInnes 04:20Hundred percent agree. And before we dive into this incredibly interesting question that you've set, and I've written down and I'm absolutely loving the look of it. And before we get into that, I think there's one other lens that the listeners should know, which is, you're also running hustle crew. Yes. Tell us a little bit about that.Abadesi Osunsade 04:43So hustle crew is social enterprise that's been going for over four years now. It was actually started off the back of my own feelings of exclusion in tech. I'd been quite oblivious to double standards around men and women's experience of startups or black and white people's experience of startups until I found myself on their seats. I have like quite a lot of like microaggressions. And just really problematic behaviour that was like impacting my ability to do my job, I was in a commercial role trying to build partnerships expand this app and other regions. And it just kind of came to a head when I quit this job with no next move plan and started to think long and hard about why I had quit and what I wanted to do next. And I felt very strongly that I wanted to do something around increasing representation in the industry, I sort of reflected on the fact that every boss, I'd had didn't look like me, I'm like, What did that mean for, you know, when I was experiencing things that were happening because of how I looked like that was a serious problem. So I got that's how hustle crew started just as a community for the underrepresented in tech to effectively be a network for each other. Because I was like, you know, just because we didn't go to McKinsey, or like Oxbridge, we're kind of losing that fast track into some of the best tech jobs. And, you know, why don't we just, you know, find a way to recreate it, like, let's build this amazing network of mentors who have the connections, and let's give each other support on our applications and our CVS. And, yeah, we just really grew from there. And about, you know, a couple years into the journey, we realised it wasn't really enough for us as individuals, as professionals, to do all of this like work levelling the playing field, giving each other like, you know, help and advice. We also needed to work with the people really creating the cultures, we go into, to make sure that they had done their work of understanding our unique challenges and making their environments supportive of us. And that's sort of been the focus more recently, like in addition to the community actually going in to companies and teaching CTOs and CEOs, about structural oppression, about bias and also about their privilege and how their privilege ca

Imagine thousands of people sprinting hard on a real bike at home, yet also congregated in a hyper-colored biome filled with mega-redwood trees and dinosaurs - yes, dinosaurs.

Each rider pedalling like crazy to set a new personal best, unlock a new virtual bike or ‘Everest’ after hours slaving and sweating. Imagine these thousands of humans riding communally, together, but digitally, often thousands of miles apart.

Today our special guest Eric Min, founder and CEO, gives us a compelling insight into the growth and design of Zwift, the ‘massively multiplayer online game’ that blends real physical effort with a virtual world to create an experience that is augmenting and evolving the world of cycling.

With hundreds of thousands of cyclists pouring from their bikes at home into the colorful, addictive biomes of Zwift through both hobby and lockdown, this hybrid healthy game isn’t just for the amateurs: this summer, the world’s peak cycling event, the official Tour de France conducted competitive races, linking racers around the world across their stationary bikes to fight for the Yellow Jersey. An incredible progression in traditional sporting practice, and a brave and serendipitous opportunity in global pandemic.

What we can learn from Zwift is about so much more than just cycling.

If this combination of…

* ‘real’ and digital

* amateur and professional

* addictive and healthy

…isn’t a fascinating part of how the world is changing around us right now, I don’t know what is! We talk about game mechanics, public health, wellbeing and obesity, professional sport, virtual/physical, scaling a community, and what’s tough about the challenges ahead.

And my lively discussion with Eric builds beautifully on the themes and core concepts established in our very first episode ‘Exploring esports’ with the brilliant Angela Natividad, which is required listening and a great companion to follow up with after this deep dive with Eric.

Friends, I do this for the impact (and the really interesting conversations!), so please help me grow Here Right Now by rating the show on Apple Podcasts, sharing with friends you think will enjoy it, and talk to me on Twitter with your feedback :) It all adds.

WM

Links

* Eric Min on Twitter

* How to get started on Zwift with a Smart Trainer - Zwift Insider

* Zwift Stories - Mathew Hayman wins Paris-Roubaix (11 min video)

* Zwift raises $450 million for gamified fitness to cycle past Peloton - VentureBeat

Credits

* Lee Rosevere for music

Automated transcript

Will McInnes  00:02

So I'm incredibly privileged today to have Eric min, the CEO and founder of Zwift here with us. Hi, Eric.

eric min  00:09

I will. Thanks for having me.

Will McInnes  00:11

How are you today?

eric min  00:13

Great. Another rainy day in London.

Will McInnes  00:19

Yes, beautiful weather. So this isn't the first time we've met, I was churning away on the bike, doing the build me up programme in Zwift. And someone flew past me and gave me a thumbs up which people use with full nodes called ride on. And I saw the name pop up. And I was like, Wait a second, I recognise that name. So while I was on the bike pedalling away, sweating into my iPhone, I googled you. And yeah, you'd give me a thumbs up, and it absolutely made my right. And I just wonder, do you? Do you do that? Do you routinely it's either you or a bot? I was basically like they've either created a bot. That's Eric, or is the real

eric min  01:08

guy. It's funny. I saw this on Facebook thread. About the same question. You know, I've gotten from Eric, is this a? Is this an automated script, a bot? Or is it really Eric? And as a discussion thread went on? And people said, Yeah, no, it's really hard because I am on Zwift every day. And as I would do in the real world, out on the road, of course, I'm going to acknowledge someone who I panellist or, you know, say hello. I mean, this is the polite thing to do when you're on the road. And so this is our version of that,

Will McInnes  01:42

I absolutely love it, I was really impressed. And it says something about you and the community you're building. And I really want to get into some of that as well. Just to break it down for the the lay person, the purpose of the podcast is really, I'm fascinated by the future that's right here with us already. And for me, Zwift is a fantastic example of something that feels very futuristic, but it's actually real and happening right now. But break it down for the layperson, like, What is Zwift? How does it work?

eric min  02:14

Right? Well, Zwift is a way to sort of recreate the outdoor activity of cycling, and we have running as well. But what we try to do is, is to do all the things that we love about outdoor cycling, and try to recreate it in a very convenient virtual setting. Um, and, you know, the thesis was that if we can get to like, 80%, of the things that we enjoy about outdoor cycling, it's many things, it's fitness, it's a social, it's the competition, it's a, it's the, you know, being able to explore new places, right, you know, come across random things, or, you know, do something that's routine to you. So, this is, this is what we tried to do, from the very beginning, I think we've, we've stayed to our core, and, you know, try to create this, this sense of community in a, in a virtual world that we are increasingly living in, that we will do something good, right. And it's all about encouraging people to, to, to lead healthy, active lifestyles, by giving them a way to do that very conveniently. Loving and, and I think, you know, that was our mission back six years ago, and it remains to be true. And I think it resonates so powerfully with, with our community, with our staff, with our investors with the media. I mean, I feel like we, you know, we're doing something really powerful for, for society. It's, you know, we live in a world of obesity, we, it's increasingly more challenging for us to go and play sports. It's not safe in many places to to do things outdoors, especially riding a bike. And so they're just it checks so many boxes, that it solved my problem and and I figured that if it would solve my problem, I suspect I can't be the only one who is you know, who had the the appetite and the craving to do more this stuff outdoors, but just can't

Will McInnes  04:28

love it. And so much of that resonates for me, my Zwift story and there are twos with subscribers in this house. My Zwift story starts with the pandemic Actually, I'm a mountain biker. I've never been a roadie. I'm not into you know the skin tight lycra and the pain the pain of the cobbles. But the pandemic began, I decided that I wanted to be cycling indoors. I spent weeks looking for turbo trainers. My friend Andy managed to find one on some niche Italian websites. I set up my gravel bike and it provided me with the conduit to stay healthy to feel good to follow a training programme. Just for the layperson, you're on your laptop, you can use a tablet, it's your the cyclist or the runner. There's there's terrain around you, you know, how do you how do you think about the virtual world that you've created? Like, where did that spring from?

eric min  05:26

You know, there was a product called a torx degiro that I used, I guess, in 2013. And it was it was a, it was a much worse version of Zwift. But it was good enough to convince me that I was there with someone else, you know, with a group of people. And we were racing. And I thought, jeez, I, I've just like, lost myself in this little group of 10 people. Imagine if we can create a beautiful version of that. Imagine if there were more people, and there were more activities for us to take part in. And you can have lots of different communities. So that was really the beginning of like, wow, this could can really work. And I think there were other like virtual cycling projects out there. I don't think there were many commercial projects. So the idea was there for many, many years. This was like before broadband was popular, right people, you know, riding using a modems, instead of broadband, cable broadband. And there was no social media, there was no mobile phones. And so you fast forward, like 2025 years, and all the pieces were there, including MMO. So, so the idea is, like, Look, let's create an MMO. Right. And let's create a this world that can have, you know, nearly infinite number of people. So our maps have to support, you know, there shouldn't be a cap, ou

Today our special guest Carrie Bishop shares her unique perspective into how public services and cities are being transformed digitally in her role as Chief Digital Services Officer for the City and County of San Francisco.

San Francsico, the metropolitan jewel of the Bay Area, birthplace of high tech and hippie cultures, and itself right on top of the fault line criss-crossing the globe dividing those with high income and those with no income. And if that wasn’t a poignant enough backdrop for this work, for this progressive agenda, Carrie and her team have been re-designing and upgrading those public services surrounded by wild fires, in a pandemic, as unrelenting structural racism exploded into the Black Lives Matter movement and counter-protests, and with the Presidential election looming…

Whatever the circumstances, day in and day out, our public services underpin so much of the fabric of our lives - schools, streetlights, sewers, permits, parking, policing. Cities do a lot. In San Francisco, the city provides more than 900 different lines of business.

But as you know yourself, around the world, and even in SF, these critical services are often delivered by paper, by PDF and spreadsheet, through processes and systems made for a different time. So how would you think about transforming those for modern, mobile, digitally morphed times? Where would you prioritize? And what should be the guiding principles?

the impact of public health crises, the impact of climate change, the impact of economic inequalities, impact of structural racism, like all of those things are kind of products in part of poor public service design

From our conversation I hope you’ll gain a deeper perspective on the gritty realities of ‘digital transformation’ in public services, since it affects us all. You’ll bounce between an exhilarating aerial view of what can be possible, back down to an unfussy account from the frontline of just how creaky legacy systems that power our world can be and how hard-won the victories are. And you’ll hear an amusing takedown on the shiny ‘smart cities’ agenda too…

Get involved and please rate, share, talk to me on Twitter with your feedback :)

WM

Links

* Carrie Bishop on Twitter

* ‘Digital Services and the Apocalypse’ - by Carrie on Medium

* San Francisco Digital Services

* FutureGov

Credits

* Lee Rosevere for music

Automated transcript

Will McInnes  00:00

Okay, I've hit record. Hello, Carrie.

carrie bishop  00:04

Hello.

Will McInnes  00:06

So I can see you're in sunny California right now.

00:10

I am. Yeah, I'm actually in Napa, California, which is a famous wine growing region.

Will McInnes  00:15

You're in Napa? Yes. Yes. Those already jealous before this, this conversation started and now you just casually dropping in world famous wine country.

00:29

Yeah, it's It is beautiful here for sure.

Will McInnes  00:32

That's wonderful. How long have you been there in Napa?

00:35

Well, actually, literally since March when I already had this house up here, but living in the city. And the idea was, we're just going to rent it out. And then the whole world change setting in San Francisco went into a long period of shelter in place, as we called it locked down, I guess it's called a DK. And at that point, you know, in this been living in San Francisco didn't have the space really or like the means to be able to work from home, I just thought, you know, I have this place in episode, I came up here, and I've been living up here full time. And that person's March, basically, which I feel so fortunate to have this space, because I know so many people who choose to grapple with this completely different life we're living and don't have that kind of privilege. But yeah, it's it's definitely been interesting.

Will McInnes  01:23

That's cool. We'll definitely be getting into that. And I just wanted to say like, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast, I'm really excited to talk to you about the work that you do. Tell us your story. You know, today you're the Chief Digital Services Officer of the city and county of San Francisco, which is such a cool job title. And I think people would love to know like, what was the path? How did you wind your way to be doing that kind of work as you are today?

01:52

Actually, my kind of first proper job out of university was working for a charity that supported single parents. So I would be on a phone line all day, people would call up and say, you know, I'm on my own. And I've got these kids. And am I entitled to any benefits? Is there anything in any support out there? For me, some people would call up and say I'm thinking of leaving my partner like, what are the implications of that. And so I would kind of talk them through the law and listen to them more often than not. So that was my first job. And that was a very kind of front lining kind of job, I was really getting an insight into people's lives from from all that the full spectrum of of income and background. And then I found this opportunity for this local government graduate programme. Basically, I kind of like, you know, the big consulting firms do these kind of graduate programmes, they hire people in, you know, on mass in a cohort and the first year and then send them off around the journey. And so local government was trying this thing out, and it was still fairly new at that point. It's much more established now. So I applied and started working in local government for the London Borough of Barnet. And I was there for four years, maybe five years did all kinds of stuff. But mostly my focus was on like organisational change within the borough and trying to work with colleagues across the borough to implement big IT systems and kind of modernise across the board. And it was really hard. And really, at that time, like the web, as we know, it just wasn't as much of a thing. And like, I remember, like, anytime you met somebody else who was on Twitter, you immediately followed each other, because you're like, oh, you're on Twitter, too. There was a, there was a new thing. And it was exciting. Like, obviously, you're on Twitter, so he must be like me, because I'm on Twitter. And no one else I know is like, so it was like, you know, Twitter was just kind of like, like minded people, you know, how naive we were. At the time, I was working with Dominic Campbell, who became my business partner, but we were good friends and colleagues at the time that we would stay late and talk about, you know, this new internet thing that was happening and that social media was happening. And we could, I mean, we both saw that it was this huge opportunity for change within the public sector. It wasn't just about, you know, social contact, but also the way people are engaging with their public institutions with democracy was shifting at that time, and people would tweet something about at the Council about, you know, the rubbish left in the back alley or something with a photo. And you know, this was like a customer service channel that councils just have no idea even existed. And so, Domino's spent some time, sort of exposing that wealth to the council and I do remember a boss of mine at the time saying it's just a phase Twitter is like CB radio. It's just geeks chatting to each other, you know, it'll die out. Definitely have used the opportunity to kind of remind him that he said that, so twice, but anyway, long story short, dumb left before I did, he left the council and said up a future Gov. And then I left and I joined Capita consulting for like five months was terrible.

05:10

And when I eventually left and joined domande, future gov and then from there, we just built this company, working with the public sector in the UK and further afield in Australia and parts of Europe, and just trying to bring not just social media, but like modern web technology to the public sector and thinking, you know, like, when, when I was implementing these big, big systems in councils overseas, they're telling social workers like, Oh, no, you have to change the way you do your job to fit this technology, like, no, this field in this database doesn't work with the way you practice social work. So you're gonna have to change the way you practice social work. And I was just like, this is some messed up stuff, you know, like, this doesn't feel like the right way to do technology. And then here, we have this web technology, and it's light. And it's, it does one thing well, and it's kind of API driven. And it's easy, you know, you don't need a three day training session to learn how to use it. It just, it's intuitive. It's designed around users. And in a dot, I think Domino both came from a place of like, what would it be like if public sector technology was as easy to use as the social tools that was the beginning of future Go for it, and then over a period of time, built that company, and then for various reasons, the time just felt right f

In this episode we discover and explore how a new kind of citizen journalism is changing the world with Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat, the foremost pioneer worldwide in online investigations and open source analysis, whose work uses publicly available online resources and content freely - and often bizarrely - shared in social media to expose alleged Russian state killers, identify the exact anti-aircraft unit involved in the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 and prosecute murderers of innocent children and their mothers in Cameroon.

From this very practical, deeply determined work from his home - and alongside a growing team and crowdsourcing community - Higgins has built up a unique global expertise.

Through our discussion, you’ll hear Eliot’s stories and practical examples that range across some of the biggest events and news stories in the world. You’ll learn about the workflow and tools of open source investigation and intelligence brought to these global events, the motivating forces of accountability and justice, and we get properly into the timely topic of conspiracy theories, including QAnon, manufactured consent, misinformation and propaganda - a topic that first bubbled up in conversation with Eric in Episode 2, ‘Deep Fake, bots & Synthetic Art with Eric Drass’.

I’m pretty sure this episode with the founder of Bellingcat will get you thinking more about the power of online communities in our lives - both for good and for bad, as well as casting a comically amateurish light on how evil perpetrators handle themselves in digital spaces.

Links

* Eliot Higgins on Twitter

* Eliot Higgins - Wikipedia

* Bellingcat website

* ‘We Are Bellingcat’ book - available for pre-order

Credits

* Lee Rosevere for music

Automated Transcript

Automated transcript

Will McInnes  00:04

Now today we have a very special guest, who's going to expand your mind about the world of online investigations until this moment, You might not believe that you could credibly prove the identity of highly trained undercover Russian killers. The origin and type of chemical weapons used in an attack in Syria, or the exact location where an American journalist was assassinated, just from online research, but you can, or more accurately, Eliot Higgins and the team and crowdsourcing community he's built up bellingcat can do prove all of this. They don't just prove it. Their work reaches international courts, law enforcement agencies and worldwide media, bringing justice to victims and accountability to the world's most feared perpetrators. So let's dive right in and learn more about what's here right now. So Elliot, thank you so much for being here with us today. I've been following You and your work for years now is just trying to dig around the internet and do my own online investigation and try and find out how long I've been following you for but I couldn't, couldn't quite get to the bottom of it. But you've come a long way. And the practices and tools and quality of your work has has had a really meaningful impact. And I just have so much respect for what you've achieved. How did you get going, like where did this all begin?

Eliot Higgins  02:26

It really started probably back in 2011, with the conflict in Libya, where I was just spending a lot of time online kind of arguing with people on the internet about things and I was interested in the Arab Spring what was happening there just because my own kind of interests in you know, I kind of grew up between the first Gulf War and the second Gulf War in 2003. And the kind of build up of that and kind of misinformation around that and the discussions around it kind of fueled my interest in kind of Middle East and US foreign policy. In a kind of Europe's in the UK, his involvement in that. So obviously Libya and what was happening there was of great interest. But with the internet, you had this kind of new element where now you have lots of videos and photographs being shared that claim to be from various places showing various things but issue around verifying what was actually true and what wasn't and arguments about that. So I first started doing is looking at these videos and thinking, you know, how can I figure out where these were actually filmed. And that's when I first realised you could look at satellite imagery, and compare what you could see in satellite imagery to what you could see in videos and photographs and confirm these locations. And that was kind of my first experience with what then became known as your geolocation, which is like a core kind of skill and technique we use nowadays with open source investigation. Over time, I kind of built up a kind of little reputation online for doing this kind of thing. And then in early 2012, I started a blog that then just let me I kind of did it as a hobby as a kind of give myself some time. Because my first child had just been born, and for previous few months, my kind of hobbies and interests got out the window. So I was getting used to that. And then I found myself with a bit of time. And I kind of came back to looking at these kind of videos. And this time it was mainly from Syria, and also looking at the phone hacking scandal in the UK, but it was all using kind of open source material. And it really just kind of dip out from that there is kind of small community starts to emerge online of people from all kinds of different backgrounds, some work in places like storyful, and Dublin, which was kind of factchecking and looking for this kind of content. Human Rights Watch, for example, there's some interest from journalists and it kind of just built an expanded from their entire launch bellingcat in 2014.

Will McInnes  04:41

It's brilliant, and I can't wait to share with people some of the the global events of such huge significance that you've, you and your team have contributed to understanding better. I guess when I was thinking about us talking I was wondering, were there clues in Who you were growing up? I used to be really interested in the armed forces. I was thinking maybe you were interested in puzzles, like, is there clues that got you into this line of work, but now you look back down the road, you can see the kind of the trail? Well,

Eliot Higgins  05:14

um, I mean, when I was a teenager in my 20s, I used to read a lot of kind of, like, I guess you would say, left wing, especially American left wing literature. I was also interested, you know, I grew up watching things like michael moore's TV nation, you know, listening to, you know, kind of spoken word stuff that was kind of a left wing, you know, read loads of Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and, you know, that kind of literature. And then that gave me an interest, I think, in kind of American foreign policy in particular, but also, you know, with things like Manufacturing Consent, this information and how countries use information to build narratives and how the media is complicit in that. I mean, now, the kind of people who do that nowadays are the people who kind of read Hey, cat rubber ironically. So I always feel a bit, it's a bit of a shame that those people kind of see it as being, you know, bellingcat been part of the CIA and, you know, that kind of thing. But I kind of understand where they're coming from it to a certain degree. But that's kind of where I think a lot of my interest was I also, you know, I was kind of a Sony spent a lot of time on the internet. So I think big part of kind of internet culture kind of helped me kind of understand, you know, certain aspects of it, or how information was being shared and how these debates happen. And that's become kind of more more useful as kind of online culture has kind of grown and also, you know, started having kind of negative impacts. You've kind of started seeing communities go around conspiracy theories, you know, Cuba norm and all these kind of things, but in a way, it's just repeating the same dynamics I've seen over the kind of last kind of 2025 years of how the internet has developed and also has meant that I understood how as we've kind of done the work of belling cat and we've kind of grown this network have individuals working together? You know, globally or online? It's because I think partly I understand how online communities kind of work. I mean, part of that is just through kind of experience, you know, doing online gaming and building communities there. And the same kind of dynamics exist in all kinds of different kinds of internet communities be they focused on serious subjects or more enjoyable, fun, lighter subjects. But it has been very interesting, particularly last few years seeing the rise of these kind of conspiracy minded communities, how the kind of dynamics and what kind of fuels that is often exactly the same kind of thing happening again and again, born of a wide variety of topics.

Will McInnes  07:39

That is a really fascinating point. And I would love to come back to conspiracy theories because the rise of conspiracy theories is it's a tide that's reaching shores far closer than I'd expe

It underpins our society and the way that we live, the way we share. We commune, it's cultural, it's religious, it's societal. It's everything that we do. But it's also - as I say - just dinner. And so it has lots of meanings and it has, in some ways, no meaning at all.

In this episode, fellow adventurers, we’re exploring the future of food, glorious food.

I talk to food futurologist Dr Morgaine Gaye about her trend forecasting that supports innovation at global brands like Unilever, Mondelez and Mars. Our conversation is wide-ranging and lively - you’ll hear Morgaine’s rarely-shared predictions for future themes in our food, find out how she became a futurologist, confront what Dr Gaye believes will be an extended period of disruption and unearth newer, clearer connections between fashion, technology, geopolitics and broad societal change.

I hope you enjoy our conversation and take something away that you can apply in your life and in your conversations :)

Please shout with any feedback you have, and if you liked the podcast, do give us a rating - I truly appreciate it.

Onwards!

WM

Links

* Dr Morgaine Gaye - website

* Morgaine Gaye - Instagram

Credits

* Lorne Armstrong of Fathom XP for the introduction

* Ross Breadmore for continued support and ideas

* Lee Rosevere for intro music

Automated transcript

Will McInnes  03:10

I was thinking before this, it would just be brilliant. To get a sense of your story. Like how, how did you get to being a food futurologist? You don't like this question!

Dr Morgaine Gaye  03:25

Oh, goodness, this is the hard. This is the hardest of all questions, really, I think like most people, they end up doing a job that they didn't expect to be doing. And I also believe that the thing that we think about trying to avoid is the thing that we draw to us. And definitely, as a teenager, might you know what this the only subjects I really hated at school was what we used to call home economics, which was sort of cooking and sewing and I really didn't like it at all, and I had some horrible disasters that really, were soul destroying in the cookery class where I ended up with the largest 10 on everybody else got the tins first for the Victoria sponge, I got the I got I got the 10 that was too big. So my Victoria sponge never met in the middle. And it was just like a thin wisp of emptiness in the middle and it was, I mean the whole thing itself must have been less than a centimetre thick. It was a poor link like a pancake. And I didn't even take it home was just horrible. So so those are those sorts of food experiences. And my mother was a butcher and my father was a bodybuilder who a power lifter actually and used to sort of want to bulk up so would be eating baby food has calories back in those days and all of the things that you could do to gain weight so there's a lot of I found mealtimes with the family really stressful. I didn't like it. I was always forced to eat things I didn't want to hear I just food was just for me, not a pleasant space. And I definitely remember thinking that is definitely not a place. I want to go Don't want to be involved in food whatsoever and low and low Here we are. But I do think that really my title food futurologists is a little bit of a red herring because the food part does make people think that I am eating my way around fabulous restaurants in the world or know a lot about cooking or, and really that is the very small end of the wedge of what I do, which is a lot more, I suppose, anthropological or distich trend forecasting. So I'm looking at lots of other things in order to forecast and think about future scenarios. And food is is the biggest part because of course, it underpins our society and the way that we live the way we share. We, we commune, it's cultural, it's religious, it's societal. It's everything that we do. But it's also it is also as I say, it's just dinner. And so it has lots of meanings and it has, in some ways, no meaning at all. So it's So food really is this like I said this small part of it.

Will McInnes  06:03

I love it. Oh this is gonna be such a good conversation. So because as you say food is so universal and it has so much power and and yet at the same time as you brilliantly put it it's just dinner How did you go from that fabulous sort of set up and the wispy Victoria sponge and into the world of trend forecasting and tell us tell us a few, just a little bit of the some of the steps that that or the way that you When did your way to to where you are now.

Dr Morgaine Gaye  06:36

I think, of course when you look back you see the connections we all do. And at school even during this time of my appalling cooking, I will I was doing things that like school pop psychology age 12 was, I would with my friends, I would say to them for them not to buy sweets and ice cream with their pocket money. Say that just imagine that you don't have these sweets. In fact, if you take this five minutes of your time when you've eaten those sweets, or buy the sweets, eat the sweets as five minutes of your life. Let's condense those five minutes, pretend that you've had those sweets, and then you've saved that money. I wrote, for me, it was like genius. So, I was sort of trying to get my friends to live in a future space. And think about things differently. So so in that way, I was probably slightly doing what I'm doing now and friends now who've sort of seen what I do probably much later on, because I'm not in touch with them have said, Oh, you will like that at school of that's the sort of stuff that you were you were at school, used to wear really weird clothes unlike anybody else. And it wasn't that I was sort of a social outcast. But that possibly I was slightly they used to say you're ahead of the curve. I don't know that for sure. But that's what they were. So that would be what they'd sort of say. So I suppose that somewhere inherently, I had this idea that time is important, and we can, and we, as human beings can think about time in a different way and position ourselves in a different future. And then life moved on. And I guess that after many different trials of things that I thought I would do, because I thought I would be an artist, I didn't want to have a job which would leave me on my own, I wanted something that would connect with people. And I couldn't figure out how to do that in an art form that would also give me a living. So I wasn't very astute at sort of putting those things together. And I think that it really the kind of the icing on the cake of how I became this is a really dear, this is a real terrible cover blow. But my friend who obviously knew that I had these different qualities that's called different qualities at this point, as she was making a progress Which is somewhere Google Hubble somewhere for BBC Worldwide, and it was about the future. And it was called business 2025, which is still the future. There's a it was a long, long time into the future at that point, as opposed to five years. And they needed an extra expert on the show. And on the show, they had some serious sort of older men who for me, I mean, I was at that point in my probably early 30s. And there were men on there who were in their late 50s. And they seemed a lot older than me at that point, I sort of low hairless and things like that. And, and they were these are experts in the future of tech and the future of other things. And she said, I'd like to sit on this panel, here are the six topics. You've got two days to think of a proposition about these six topics into into 2025. And what you what your personal opinion about this future is. And then I went on the show, and they gave me a title and the title was futurology. Just so that was the beginning of that, really is that she gave me a title. And I thought, okay, I can I can do that. And I held my own against these guys. And I just thought, well, maybe I couldn't I can do this. I don't know. That's sort of it. Rather,

Will McInnes  10:17

it's a great, it's a great story. And I'm sure there's so much more. But it's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that and to hear, to hear from, from those early days at school that you are always a bit of a future gazer and seeing the world slightly differently and, and trying to get people around you to put themselves somewhere else.

Dr Morgaine Gaye  10:38

Yeah, I mean, just trying to trying to think I think for me, it was about thinking about things. That was General and then my PhD was about thinking about things and how things connect. And I think that was just a setup really for doing what I do. I'm connecting lots of things. My my, the most important thing about what I do is to challenge people's thinking I'd open their minds and then it's up to them what they do with that knowledge really.

Will McInnes  11:04

And tell us about your PhD, what what was the PhD on or about

Dr Morgaine Gaye  11:11

the, the idea of the PhD was looking at the way things connect, and it started off sort of trying to be in the realm of quantum mechanics, but that was a little bit difficult

In this episode, I talk to respected synthetic artist Eric Drass - who you may know as Shardcore - about his work playing with neural networks, Deep Fake, bots and, underneath it all, the increasingly pressing question of how we can know what is true and what is not in the mediated, boundless, shape-shifting digital world we occupy.

Eric is an artist who makes work in a range of media, from painting through to generative experiments which live on the net. Some of his favourite themes are identity, consciousness, the philosophical ramifications of artificial intelligence, big data and the relationship between humans and machines. Sometimes this work is political, frequently it is playful, often it is provocative or transgressive in some way. His works are often reported and cited online (see BoingBoing, Imperica).

I hope you gain a new perspective from our conversation - art and artists like Eric exist to prod and provoke us to look at the world differently, and listening to him did just that for me.

Please let me know any and all of your feedback, share this podcast and - if you fancy it - leave us a glowing review on Apple Podcasts :)

Onwards!

WM

Links

* http://shardcore.org

* @erocdrahs

* Latest major work (NSFW): http://themachinegaze.com

Credits

* Anna Carlson, Louis McInnes and Georgia Tregear for first listens

* Mark Pinsent, Alison Goldsworthy and Leo Ryan for helpful critical feedback on Episode 1

* Lee Rosevere for intro music

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hererightnow.substack.com