I enjoyed this conversation.

Professor Sam North is a teacher and writer.

In his words, he’s “developing a cross-disciplinary bite of education that has three components: religious stories as networks of growth and cooperation (Theology and Religion), mycelial (fungal) networks as prosecutors of growth and cooperation (Biology) and social networks as the new 'hearth' of identity and storytelling, fostering both cooperation and division. I'm particularly interested in the corruption of all of the above”.

Curious, I was.

And that was before he shared the course sub title: God. Stories. Facebook. Mushrooms.

I’m in.

To dip your toe into the unlikely connection between these curious strands, do check out the conversation. I hope you enjoy.

Further reading

• Rudolf Steiner
• Brian Boyd
• Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake

Hey, welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

A series of conversations with entrepreneurs, advisors, activists, and

academics intended to inspire you with ideas from the margins, the periphery.

Because that's where the ideas which will shape tomorrow are hiding

today, on the margins, the periphery.

This week I spoke to Professor Sam North.

Sam works out of the University of Exeter.

He's an award-winning writer of eight novels and two films.

We talk about a new course he's teaching, oh, he's created actually, which

connects the various story networks of religion, mycelium and social media.

I know.

Interesting.

The course subtitle is all you need to know, God, story, Facebook, mushrooms.

Let's dive in Sam.

Welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

Thank you for having me.

We met virtually, I guess it's how most people meet these days on the

deep transformation network, which was a small community, which has been

initiated by another of our guests.

Jeremy Lent, who's he's written two books, actually, I think he's

written three books, hasn't he?

But uh, two books within the kind of orbit of my kind of awareness, the Patterning

Instinct and the Web of Meaning.

And I, Jeremy has been a guest on the podcast, as I mentioned, he was talking

about the book, the Web of Meaning.

And so I'm curious, what was your connection to the community that Jeremy

has set up and connection to Jeremy?

It started with a local friend of mine.

Who's a sculptor well-known skeptical Peter Randall Page

and I was writing an essay.

I researching and writing an essay in which I Peter Randall

Page really just recommended me.

I read the Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent, and so I read it and I

immediately knew I'd be citing from it.

And I immediately knew that, well, it's an important, it's an important work.

And so I emailed him and I was very surprised to get an answer.

You know, it was rather wonderful.

And I, yes, I guess I'm prone to doing that.

Just suddenly emailing people that I really admire and like their work.

And often of course, people don't reply, but often they do, and I

think particularly with writers, they really appreciate, someone latching

onto their work and it's showing some appreciation of what they're up to.

And so I'm quite often surprised about how many people do answer

it in a really productive way.

And then Jeremy told me.

I told them what I was doing, and he said, well, he's doing setting up this network.

And I said, well, that's really interesting to me because I'm doing this.

And and so I said, well, let me know.

And so a month or two later he, invited me to be a moderator, you know, one

of the initial, you know, as you were, the initial people to sign up for it,

to be the, among the first to sign up for this network that he started.

So I, my collection is exactly the same.

I really enjoyed the book.

And so wrote him an email in much the same way.

I know.

I'm also prone to that, but I think it's actually, it's just worthwhile kind of

remind you, because I think too often, we sort of assume, don't worry that

actually a people don't want to hear us, but of course, if they don't want

to hear from us, they ignore us, but it too often people would be motivated or

would be interested to contact somebody and just don't they just let it go.

So I guess this is a kind of an invitation, if you have

that urge to do it, to write

Absolutely.

You know, you, you know about entrepreneurship, you of all people

know about entrepreneurship and there's, it's something I'm often

talking to my students about is this spirit of making things happen.

The spirit of actually you can divide the events that happened to us into

sort of two types, you know, there's the types that happen to you, like a

pandemic arrive, and then there are those events that you create by virtue

of exerting your willpower in the world because you wish them to happen.

And those events are it's.

I think it's a really important skill.

It's the sort of thing I think should be taught in schools.

It just made it that the back of that, difference between the two types of

event and the difference in a life that you can actually actively create

by virtue of making things happen.

Yeah.

I was struck by that.

You talk about it in school.

Cause my children are quite little to their like in primary school age.

And uh, I often have this sort of debate, you know, we live in, this

sort of in Hove, which is a suburb of Brighton on the south coast of the UK.

People get very stuck on the kind of treadmill of school and the journey that

it's on and what you need to be doing.

Even when the kids are really little like, 10 and seven, like my kids are.

You have a set of hurdles that you have to jump over and yeah.

But actually in many respects, the thing that would be the kind of best

education for them as you're talking.

Is a creative competence and ability to kind of engage with the world to,

you know, irrespective of outcome, engage with the world confidently,

try and make things happen.

He says that constructive

Yeah.

And learn from your failures.

And I Steiner had a lot of a lot to say on this matter, you know, there's a famous

education, as you know, so it's Steiner schools tend to operate more along this

way, where they tap into what students really want to do and want to make happen.

I think it's, it should be much more in the mainstream, more peripheral thinking

then that should be in the mainstream.

all we did more, much more of that, particularly in universities, I'd say.

Uh when we, we met via the deep transformation network you got, we were

doing a kind of little introduction of all of the people who were moderators, those

kinds of pioneer members as you put it.

And uh, you were talking about, and you caused that you were

looking to do, which I guess were actually some context for that.

So you work at a university or you're a professor, maybe give us a little bit of

a background of what you do and where.

So yes, I am.

I'm an associate professor at the uh, University of Exeter

in the Southwest of England.

And I worked for law.

I worked within a large English department and the creative writing

team, which I'm a member is a kind of small group of maybe five or six, six

of us, various creative writers within a really enormous English department.

I think there was over 70 academics in the English department, but

it's a big English department.

And we, we cover all sorts of ground, but this is a new module that I wanted

to devise and the actually I'm perhaps jumping the gun a bit because it hasn't,

it's about to be approved, we have this kind of approval process where, if

you design a module within a program, Then it goes through a kind of quite

rigorous kind of testing, stress testing sort of system for academic approval,

financial approval and so on and so forth.

And we're about to, I think, I think we'll go through okay.

Because everyone seems to really welcome it.

And the nice thing about it is that it's going across different disciplines.

So it's going to have its home in actually not increase writing.

It's going to have its home and theology and religion.

But it's going to be available to students of a communications

degree and also an English degree.

And it's also going to be available at MA level.

So all things being equal and it makes it through this journey.

Do you want to give us a little kind of headline for

what you're hoping this to be?

Yeah, well, I'm calling it a strange word.

So the title of the module, it's called Atopia, which means

a space without boundaries.

So a Topia and there's lots of utopia or through Topia is, and there's lots

of, Topia kind of words kicking about particular light because it sounds,

yeah, I liked the, I like what the word means, this idea of crossing boundaries.

And I think one of the things that's happened in the digital age is this

business of boundaries really just kind of desolving in lots and lots

of very crucial ways, particularly around the idea of networks, you know,

where boundaries just don't exist.

They're just human beings in the screen and the digital space or whatever.

So I called it a Topia, but then my colleague in intelligent region came

back and said, I think we need a bit of.

We need a bit of a subtitle because it's like, what is that?

It needs something that will just alert people to what this is.

So then I said, okay, this is the subtitle.

So I said Atopia dash God, stories, Facebook and mushrooms.

uh, Not, you would, you would probably sort of class yourself as a marketer,

but obviously the first rule of marketing any new venture is to have an

extraordinary idea, something captivating, and there is something extremely

intriguing about the title and subtitle

keep talking, Ben, keep that sacking.

What I want to hear.

I hope it will be very attractive.

I hope so.

We'll see.

I mean, the nice thing about doing things like this is that you seem to

find out, you know, in September when we've got three students we'll know

that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

And if we have a hundred students we'll know, it was a brilliant idea.

So we'll

And I guess the reality with all of these things is, you know, three students this

year is, 10 students next year is 15 the year after and so on and so forth.

Yeah.

So, what would you say is the best way of talking about this is the best way

of talking about this to dip into each one first and then stitch it together?

Or how do you imagine this as a family?

I suppose the best way is to mentioned the sort of three pronged thing

that's going on here that reason.

And it's a bit like having three vases on a shelf that, you know, are

sort of different visors, but they are, they live on the same shelf.

They are the sorts of the same thing while being very

different, but they're all vases.

Do you know what I mean?

So they, but the style of them, you can see that the made by the

same person and they're similar.

So, so these three things, and I know the subtitle has four,

but Gordon stories are together.

uh, We're really looking at the idea of religious storytelling

being networks of corporation.

So renter storytelling is the most extraordinary thing that happened to

storytelling, really when the element of magic, crept into storytelling

and created these incredibly enduring religious myths and stories that form a

basis for how people live their lives.

But they're essentially networks of corporation, religions on networks.

You.

And I agree that we have the same kind of moral outlook and we

subscribed to the same story and we cooperate with each other heavily.

We contribute to the churches' coffers.

We divide our labor, we share our work, we share the benefits of our

work, and therefore we sustain our existence in a much more powerful way.

So that kind of hyper social use social element to the human story

is is incredibly successful.

And we are like, if you count the eusocial species as being, and termites,

wasps bees and human beings, you know, you can see that storytelling

is the way in which we cement our.

Our cooperation and the way that pheromones are used by ants to

cement and create that cooperation.

So storytelling is not just some kind of entertainment function.

It is it in deeply embedded in the way in which we, in the way

in which we live and religions of different types and cults as well.

I mean, even small stories that are, you know, are the most

extraordinarily powerful versions of these co-operative structures.

So religions are like nests in a way, but by virtue of being a story with

myth and costume and diet and all these other sort of paraphernalias, they can

cross over boundaries, they can, they can invade, they can grow and spread.

And so that's one prong.

If you like.

Of a cooperative network that, that is a religious story.

So that's prong number one.

Prong number two, or vase number one, if we could shouldn't mix

our mix, our metaphor files.

Number one is the religious story, so vase number two are, are the social

networks, the Facebooks and TikTok and the Instagrams of this, of our age, which are

essentially as well um, you know, enormous kind of networks of cooperation, even

things like eBay, even commercial ones.

They are networks of cooperation where we agree a certain kind of form

of behaviors, a certain form of into reactions and an interlinked quality.

And we're all hoping to benefit, you know, some of us commercially, some of us just

in terms of our social life, some of us in terms of our charitable enterprises,

our sports groups or whatever it is, whatever, however we're using networks.

And the deep transformation network has a political network.

It has a mission.

It has a story that it wishes to, to prosecute.

And those of us who are signing up to Jeremy Lent's network wish to

spread that political message and recruit, you know, and cooperate

and share just as we're doing now.

So this and it's an extraordinary modern phenomenon of enormous power.

And the third one, which is perhaps even more extraordinary story, the third kind

of thoughts on the shelf is the history of fungal networks, mycelium network um,

which from the beginning of time, half, literally from the first time that sort of

microbes crawled out onto the earth, yeah.

I've cooperated with other forms of life in order to spread these enormous

networks, which were only really recently beginning to understand just

how fundamental they are to all forms of life, whether vegetable or animal.

And so that kind of idea of a, of fungal networks creating a kind of

or evolving, shall we say, evolving a cooperative venture in order to

thrive is, is one of the great and extraordinary stories of nature.

And it, And it's also quite a new story and it's quite a new area.

And I think we're only just beginning to understand is the extent of

the success of fungal networks.

All three of those have a sort of pattern of feed as it were, what they, the fuel

for the networks, how they grow, how they spread, how they cement their influence.

But they also have various ways in which they can die or decay

or feed off to K or create decay.

And they, and corruption is rife, you know, like in all forms of life corruption

is rife and corruption and decay.

We live on top of corruptions and decay..

All of them, all of life lives on top of corruption and decay.

And networks have the same um, you know, idea of the internet itself was,

was devised, you know, in the cold war.

And it was meant to be attack proof.

That was the idea behind the internet.

It was that there was no central thing that you could destroy.

And it's a bit like the blood supply.

If you stop my artery here, my blood supply just finds

another way of going around it.

So the internet was designed to be proof against decay, but actually

it's really quite franchise it's really quite susceptible to attack.

And certainly it's a festival for corruption.

So these were the ideas that we're all just putting, throwing together into

this module, these three vases, as it were to bump them up alongside each

other and create an understanding, hopefully a sort of almost quite I,

what I'm hoping for is a really quite new kind of understanding of how we

should live our lives and how we should navigate these, I think quite difficult,

new insights of our heads, I think are profoundly different from how they were

20 years ago, profoundly different.

And I think we need to navigate that new consciousness in a way which has

happened as a result of the digital age.

And I don't think anyone really foresaw quite how powerful the digital age was

Yeah.

I mean, there's a kind of huge amount, a huge amount in there.

So there was something that you, you said you mentioned kind of early on

this kind of idea of the magic of storytelling being inserted into it.

So what, what, what do you mean by, what do you mean when you say the

kind of the magic of storytelling?

What do you mean in that?

What I mean is that storytelling if you go back into the work of people like

Brian Boyd who's written brilliantly on the idea of storytelling evolving

out of gossip around the campfire.

And as hunter gatherers, we cooperate, we divide our labor.

You're a great hunter.

I grow brilliant berries.

You know, your wife is great at constructing huts, to my wife is

a fantastic cook or storyteller or whatever it might be.

So we divide our labor and we cooperate and we meet around the campfire and around

the campfire we morally assess how good our corporation is and we punish those

who are stealing or bullying or any of the other anti corporative behaviors

and gossip, gossip is the way in which we police our high court cooperation.

And then what happens is gossip becomes, a very powerful force and good gossip

lasts, a good gossip is repeated and and it's repeated over and over again.

And then if I start to begin to realize what makes for good gossip, I begin

to get skilled at gossip itself.

Then I begin to realize that if you put a magical element into storytelling, in

other words, if you have a half man and a half creature or such like, or some

kind of mystical element to it, that is beyond the other side of the grave,

some kind of supernatural element, then that story becomes much more powerful.

That piece of gossip, then it evolves into a myth or legend, which people can

sign up to, you know, they can repeat and it becomes part of their life.

So, and these are the very early, very strange kind of spiritual kind

of beliefs of early tribes, which are fascinating, but they involve magic.

You know, They involve a magical supernatural element.

And so the story actually begins to work, not just as gossip from the bottom up,

it begins to work from the top down.

So the magical elements means that I can use a store.

In order to create corporations.

So I can recruit you to my powerful, magical story.

And you will cooperate with me to the nth degree because you are

quite frightened of the forms of punishment that I can inflict on you.

I can send you to hell or whatever the supernatural punishment might be.

So the corporation becomes not just the run of the mill cooperation that you

might expect from a corporate is species.

It actually becomes all, could be almost self destructive.

I am willing to blow myself up for this story because of what I believe.

And so these kind of magical element is a crucial insertion.

That means that stories heading is not just from the ground up

creating corporation, but it's also in forcing cooperation or recruiting

cooperation from the top down.

And that's the that's how evolution has done it.

And it's writers like Brian Boyd you've done just wonderful work in this

area for, so we're really beginning to understand how story works, and

networks like Facebook or giant campfires, stories take off stories,

take off whether they're true or untrue.

And often the most untrue stories are the ones that really take off.

You know, President Trump is fighting a network of pedophiles from a

chicken restaurant in Kentucky.

You know, The more mad you make it, the more people are inclined

to really love believing it.

And that's unfortunately how that's, how we've evolved as kind of story creatures.

And, And we've got to learn, we've got to learn to change that really,

or at least to understand it

Yeah, so, these are relatively recent understanding th this, this kind of

understanding of the, the mechanic and dynamic and power of story has been

understood in some form for maybe for as long as we've been telling stories.

I'm kind of curious around that.

it's been effective for as long as we've been telling stories, but I

don't think it's been understood in quite the raw in, in quite such kind of

powerful ways as in the last, 20 years.

And I think that understanding is yes, relatively recent from anthropology

and from people like Brian Boyd and Christopher Bowie, you know,

who really understand how the human creature and story work together.

Just just to ask her X how extraordinarily important it is.

I'm kinda curious about whether that kind of understanding does create sort

of stories, a bit of a weapon, actually.

What kind of people understanding its power more and what kind

of bubbles up in that space?

Yes.

And I don't think that president Trump has given an inch of thought to the

power of storytelling, in terms of, has he read Brian Boyd and realize that he

can create, do you know what I mean?

it's entirely instinctive and that's, what's wonderful, but also awful

about it is that you don't ha you don't need to teach us about story.

A two year old child you'll know you've got young children.

You don't have to teach them what makes for a good story.

It's very, it's a native instinct in assets.

It's that it's like pheromones for ants.

You don't have to teach an aunt about pheromones.

They know exactly what to do with their pheromones.

You know what I mean?

It's not, it's in the DNA.

And and I think stories are our pheromones.

And so people have a native instinct for it, and don't really need to

analyze it, but I think we do now.

And I think that's why I think education is so important in terms of

schools, I think, where people really need to understand the mechanics

of storytelling and the mechanics of networks and how they work.

And I think that's, for me, it's the most important subject of the

so this idea that one of the things then that gave the kind of fuel and the

power to the religious story was this infusion of magic in a sense uh, if

understand the public, so that takes it onto a completely new level of, of power.

know, I live in a rural area.

We have a group of farmers who share their farm equipment.

Do you know what I mean?

It's bottom up.

I scratch your back.

You scratch mine.

It's that kind of stage of altruism, reciprocal altruism.

It's not, it's the way, it's the way human beings have operated

forever, literally forever.

And it's highly effective and it, but it means there are certain sort of parameters

to you know, that kind of altruism, that kind of reciprocal altruism.

I have to know those people for a reasonably long period of time.

I have to be confident that you're going to bump into them again or know

them for long enough to get my, my, my share of the case, yeah, having

given them their share of the cake.

So all these things tie into the idea of reciprocal altruism, which

is a ground up kind of cooperative venture that is very, yeah, it's very

natural, it's organic and it grows from the ground up and it really works.

But with magic and storytelling, being a way in which we form these groups,

suddenly I can, I can actually invent a story and impose it from the top down.

And that has seat.

We've seen the fierce and consequences of that and the fearsome power

of that with religious stories and often to huge benefits.

I mean, some regions have done the most extraordinary volume of good works,

which often goes absolutely unspoken, you know, huge, huge initiatives all

over any continent you care to mention really, but also terrible corruptions

and, terrible acts of violence and terrible inflections of kind of

corruption and decay, on people's lives.

So both both have really important to understand how that happens and

these aren't, you know, these aren't, none of these people are stupid.

You know, They're clever people, it's not just like, these are people who are

deeply in trouble or socially distressed who subscribed to these stories.

He's the cleverest among the club, but we'll sign up for them.

So it's really important to understand how that power works.

how does that power work?

It works, but because, because we're story creatures, because it's, you know,

it's works in exactly same way that pheromones work in ads where it's like

catnip, we actually just turned two.

If we give them the right story and it hits us just in the right way,

told him the charismatic and magical faction, we will turn into it.

We'll turn straight into it and we'll wrap it up.

And we'll try and live in that space because it will feel,

it'll feel wonderful to us.

And how it gets corrupted is by virtue of human characters.

One of the striking images of the Trump era was Trump in his office,

in the white house with very, I think he was signing something and

he had all, maybe it was something to antiabortion or something like that.

But anyway, he had all these figures of the Christian, right behind him all deeply

devout Christians on the right wing.

And he was there like doing their thing.

There's no way for Trump is a Christian.

I mean, not really, but the point is he absolutely understands the power of that

story, and how many people he, you get.

Actually he's a bully and a cheat, you know what I mean?

He's there using stories in a way to further his own ends and the end

and the good fortune of his family.

He, and he creates these crazy stories and you watch people believe them, and it's

not just the 70 million people believe that the election was stolen from him.

You know, That's a story.

And, it's a fictional story and he can recruit using that kind

of the magical power of that story by virtue of his charisma.

yeah, I think it's either the same image or another one.

And they were kind of standing around him.

I know that there was a, there was a kind of group prayer going on, I think.

And there was like a preacher behind it?

He has his hand on his shoulder and actually it's incredibly

powerful sort of evocative.

Like I

It is your way we're talking about the same one.

I've forgotten that you're absolutely right.

We're talking about the same image.

They were all, they were sort of bowed in prayer when they and, and this strange

feeling of mixture of fit, looking at the, some of the people believing the

prayer, president, Trump plainly not believing in anything to do with prayer,

but he knows how useful it is to him.

You know, He knows just how powerful it is and how many people

he can recruit to do his bidding.

That's the classic cheat at work, and networks.

I think, you know, the sort of networks, the stories of networks today mean

one of the things that fascinates me about corruption is I think for the

first time in history, we are now inundated with attempts to cheat us.

This wasn't happening 20, 30 years ago.

It would be very rare that someone would be once or twice in my life

that someone would try and sell me.

So I remember once this building gang turned up and tried to sell

me a new chimney, because you have to, I, because, and they were

definitely trying to cheat me.

There's nothing wrong what you need, but they said that there was

something wrong with my chimney and he's replied, someone tried to cheat

me, but that was like once a decade.

Now it's literally every day I'm having multiple attempts to cheat me.

That has got a strange text saying your parcel has failed to be delivered.

You know, you know what I mean?

it's like, it's almost continual now this business of people trying to cheat you.

And so we feel like in this space we're living in is becoming

extraordinary, very stressful.

This thing around the kind of magic, then the kind of the kind of magic

is the, I guess this is in the art of the creative writing is kind of

knowing and understanding what makes the captivating seed, I guess, because.

That.

And that is in experimenting.

That is in craft that is in structuring the kind of rules of writing in a sense,

It's in the techniques that garner people's attention that

win and keep and and deepen people's involvement in a story.

And that's technique.

And that's been going on for a long time, but I think our understanding of

how these techniques work are becoming more and more, yeah, just more and more

interesting and more and more detailed and quite a lot of work being done on

that in the last 50 years, certainly, especially since the birth of cinema.

Cinema depends on capturing the attention of every single man, woman and child,

rather than an elite readership because of the commercial concerns of cinema.

And so, there's been an enormous amount of research and really fascinating

kind of work on technique about how stories become more and more powerful,

how they work on the human mind.

So yeah, that, that's also very, that's part of our that's part of our

And so there's, I'm curious.

So, story, power, magic, all of these sorts of things.

And so, so w how would, where does this then meet the social network?

Where does God meet Facebook?

And maybe he already has for all we know, but what.

I guess, I guess I think the point I'm trying to make is

that religions are networks.

Are there they've you literally contribute?

And so, and I think a lot of that is about the finances.

So, I think, so this is why I'm very interested in the fuel for networks.

So Facebook is a network as a simple agreement among a group of people

to subscribe, to and give time and attention to a, as a space, if you like.

A space that they share with other human beings.

And the way in which we do it, it's very similar to religions.

You know, We might have our charitable enterprise or our sporting group

just like religions do we might.

And isn't.

And some of that is so such good work has done something.

If you count up the good works that Facebook does, by virtue of

these groups of people getting together to help each other and help

others or help others who are less fortunate themselves, it's enormous.

And it's sort of often, often all we hear about the bad news, you

know, the corruptions and so on.

But actually there are a huge amounts of good works that happen and huge movements.

I mean, the Arab spring was born out of Facebook.

It really was, it was born out of a large group of people, subscribing to a network

where they suddenly experienced life in a very different way, and suddenly wanted to

change the kind of moral fabric of their society in a radical way are more, you

know, horribly suppressed and repressed.

And so this idea that that our network grows and has fuel by virtue

of our agreement to give it time and attention and love as it were,

is also counteracted by how then it actually gets its commercial.

Crowd, which is via advertising.

And of course, as soon as you introduce advertising, everything becomes deceitful.

And the reason that no children, no youth, no young people are

joining up for Facebook anymore.

It's become corrupt.

It's a kind of, it's actually, I think dying much more than people realize.

And fair enough, Facebook buys up Instagram, but actually this now the

same thing's happening to Instagram.

You know, corruption is embedded now via advertising.

And what you're finding, I think increasingly is that people are moving to

a new network which doesn't have so much advertising, but then in order to monetize

that network, they'll start advertising on TikTok and so on and so forth.

And people will migrate to where there's less corruption.

Uh, so that fascinates me the idea of how networks create, you know, how they

spread and how they keep their power and how they grow their financial cloud.

I think all that's very interesting.

they can't, they need fuel, you know, you need fuel you to run a network and

to keep it going and to keep it growing.

And one of, one type of fuel is human attention.

Like the time we're giving we're, we're all giving time to Jeremy

Lent's network, we're giving our energy to it, our affection and our

support and probably money as well.

And certainly we'll need to give it money just like anyone would a church,

you know, we'd, we'd turn up on Sundays.

We'd give, we put money in the collection tim.

We would support the enterprise of the story of the network.

If and we therefore hope to spread it and grow it and maintain it.

It's exactly how fungal networks work too.

They have evolved to link up and spread and find food.

Um, The lovely difference about mycelial fungal networks is that they live off

decay and indeed decay in the, and create decay um, by virtue of their

best strangely kind of animal, like ability to consume things that are

going to rot and to create the rot.

So that is there, the rot is their food in a way.

Which is kind of in a way similar to advertising.

You know, for me in Facebook, the rot is advertising, but it's what the network

is actually designed by its owners to do.

If so in other words, the executives of Facebook are feeding off the rot that

is that they're creating via the network of Facebook, and they're enriching

themselves to the most astonishing and extraordinary and unprecedented degree.

It's interesting, you make that, but make that point, because in a

way, I guess my, where my mind was going, as you were describing how a

kind of mycelial network effectively thrives on its decay and regeneration.

Whether that actually those sort of man-made networks for want

of a better phrase, whether it's the religious networks, whether

it's whether it's Facebook.

sort of social networks, that actually, whether they ultimately are constrained

by that they have an inability to live beyond a kind of fundamental decay

Well, I'm going to guess yes, because I do think they will die.

I do think that Facebook will die.

I don't know.

Cause none of us knows we're moving into unchartered territory, but it

certainly seems to me and, and I, I get kind of 300 young people passing

by me every year, you know what I mean?

And the use of Facebook has diminished hugely from when I

started teaching 14 years ago.

The use of Facebook isn't now, but it's still very prevalent,

but it's infinitely less.

And also the people who even subscribed to it hardly use it.

Do you know what I mean?

There are many more kind of dead members, I think rather

than actual live active members.

And so I find that really interesting, you know, the network is still

there and it can still claim 7 billion users or whatever, not 7

billion, 3 billion, wherever it is.

Um, but how many of them are actually just, they're just like Deadwood,

they're just not using it anymore?

And so if you compare a network like that to something like eBay or, you

know, the ones where there is a kind of financial a more honest, shall we say,

trading relationship within the network that is still a form of cooperation.

You've used your shoes.

You don't want them anymore.

I want your shoes on.

I don't want to buy new ones.

Are by, this is exactly how cooperation works from the ground up, we share

and you give me some money and I give you, give me my, your shoes

and I'll give you some money.

And that is a sort of form of cooperation.

But the financial business is less corrupt.

You know, It's not deceitful and it's quite straightforward um, money working,

how it sort of should work really.

Whereas I think advertising and the whole business of data harvesting is

deeply deceitful and corrupting and bad for the soul, and that's why people are

stopping using Facebook because they just can't stand in the outfits, you know?

You were talking earlier about, the kind of the bottom up, I didn't

like the, what you have in your community, this kind of reciprocal

altruism, which could these ideas feel really beautiful and really timely.

And I'm wondering if they get corrupted by the kind of top-down elements.

So is the top down is the kind of top down push the thing, which ultimately

kind of undermines the network?

It can be.

And an enormous amount of storytelling is about the relationship between the

bottom up co know cooperation versus the top-down political or religious

story that in that imposes itself and can ruin that bottom up story.

So much storytelling is about exactly that, that relationship between a top-down

and it might be a political structure rather than a rigid story, but nonetheless

it's imposed sense of justice, you know, so it's a courtroom drama, and that sort

of match this natural feeling we have for cooperation is very instinctive in us.

It's and it makes all of us much more optimistic because of that,

because that lovely feeling is it's love, it's elation or elevation.

It's sometimes called.

This feeling that rushes in when cooperation works when, and they

say it's just as pleasurable to give as it is to receive.

And that has been proved to be exactly the case.

They've done these wonderful experiments in America where they measure oxytocin

in, in, in groups of students.

you know, When they give a small amount of money to a network or

receive a small amount of money to a network and the oxytocin levels,

it's like a little injection of love, you know, oxytocin is the love drug.

And it's like a little injection that goes into the bloodstream when I give to the

network or when the network gives to me.

And one of the key things from that experiment was that.

If they inform people that it wasn't human beings pressing the computer

keys, but it was the machine itself, like a lottery, machine or whatever,

just choosing who to give to the oxytocin was not injected at all.

It absolutely depends on it being one human to another.

And in a way it's a kind of an idea which we've just become sort of

separated from, or um, so much of the kind of narrative of our culture,

particularly our culture, where we are is kind of these ideas we externally

have become quite disconnected from.

I think in some ways yeah, I suppose I'm more optimistic than

you than I don't think we're coming just connected from that.

I think in some ways the digital space has helped us to realize that more.

I think by virtue of these digital spaces, we are, we're feeling that

more frequently, more often, and I think so I'm encouraged by that.

I think that's one of the benefits of the digital networks is that they can

create this marvelous kind of oxytocin laden impetus for the benefit of

everyone, you know, and that's why we're calling it atopia, because it crosses

boundaries, you know, It's not just a.

I mean, me and you being in the UK, it's about stretching across

two of our fellow subjects.

And when you've got a global challenge, as we have now in, on, in the answer proceed,

when you've got a global challenge, such as Jeremy Lent's network is trying to

find to prosecute, it's really important that we grow and build that cross border.

You know, We need a network to go across the borders, across the

racial divides, across the gender divides to touch the common humanity

of every single human being.

And I think that's going to be essential if we're going to

get to where we want to get to.

So, um, kind of students that are both, you kind of, sort of come into contact

with just through the course of your sort of teachings and also the students

who might kind of come through on this specific course, this kind of there,

this kind of motivation, they are still coming to you with this kind of, seed

of optimism with this kind of, seed of positivity with this kind of positive will

to seek out and find these connections too

Yeah.

Very definitely.

Very definitely.

And I think I think it's one of the reasons I think um, they're also

coming with unparalleled levels of anxiety and parallel levels of stress.

And I think that's completely natural.

I think given, again we, it's quite easy cause it's so normal.

It's quite easy to forget just how transforming, you know, the

digital era has been on us all.

You know, we never used to walk around with a phone that measures our popularity

every single second of every day.

Do you know what I mean?

We never used to do that.

We are pursued by news stories by our peers, by our.

Friends or followers our approvals, our ratings, you know, our likes or dislikes.

And I think it's a highly stressful environment.

So although I think we've got an unparalleled, I think we've got a

newly politicized youth in a very exciting way who are very determined

to change things for the better for everyone as well, not just for the

elite groups who have been lucky enough to be born into wealthy countries.

And I think that's an incredibly powerful force that hasn't really found

its full might yet, but I also think there are also unprecedented levels of

anxiety attached to the digital sphere where we're all spending so much time.

That's the point.

When I was a kid I'm 62.

When I was a kid, you maybe watch a couple of hours of television and

the rest of the time, you're with actual people in real environment.

Now if you take a train into London now and you look into, you know, it's maybe

winter in the afternoon and you'll, you're traveling on this train and you're

looking into all these office windows, everyone's doing what we're doing.

Whether you're at work or whether it's your social life, whether it's

watching television in the evening, you are you're in the digital realm

more than you are in the real world.

I mean, it's, I'm kind of curious about the kind of where, where would

you sort of touched on a little bit?

Where do you.

Um, Students who've gone through the kind of module where, so where,

where do I get to at the end?

How is my kind of, how has my life changed in whatever sort of way

that it might be come the end?

I got to be incredibly vainglorious the, if I thought I need, we do.

I mean, one of the lovely things that happens in teaching a university level is,

is the messages you get from your students of 10 years ago who might just send

you an email and saying, I'm here now.

And I remember what happened in your class.

You know what I mean?

It's, it brings tears to my eyes when I get emails like that.

And it's it's deeply affecting to think, to believe vaingloriously that you're

going to improve, improve someone's life.

And it's the wonderful, the most wonderful feeling.

Do I, what do I think they're going to, hopefully they're going to come out of

this module with a more kind of evolved relationship with the digital era, Let's

say, with let's call it digital humanity about the humanity of the digital age.

And I think more.

Able to cope with it, hopefully, and more aware of its dangers

and more excited by its powers.

Yeah, So they kind of understand essentially what's happening the

Paris story, how it's appropriated and harnessed by these networks.

So they have some of that, some of those tools to engage

Those to really understand it and therefore deal with

it as a kind of life force.

Really it's, that's what it's become, you know, it's become its own life force.

It really is.

It's swallowing us all up in the most amazing way.

Like I say, I'm firmly convinced that the insides of our heads have different

from how they were 20 years ago.

Yeah.

Right.

So that was, I wanted to just pick, pick up on that, come back to that.

So in, in kind of in what way, and I appreciate that it's like a sort

of huge question, but what was.

Well, what's your what's your feeling around that?

I think when living in the imaginary realm, we're living in, we're living

in the world of thought, to a degree that if before it was like 80% in

the real world with objects and props and the grass outside in the field

and the barn and the walls and the doors and my cooking tray and, all the

stuff I have to do to keep life going.

If before it was, you know, 80, 20 or even 90 10, I think

it's now the other way around.

I think we're living in the realm of thought the imaginary space, the space of

where thinking happens 80% of the time.

And therefore, I think of course, we're moving through the world, coping with

feeding ourselves and having lifting coffee cups when we meet our friends

and we're not doing anything about that worse or badly, we're, we're putting on

amateur dramatic shows, we're taking our driving tests, we're engaging with the

real world, but I think we are now in our heads that kind of imaginary realm or

the realm of thought is now a room that's taking up 80% of the inside of our house

rather than the 20% that it wasn't before.

And I think we have to learn how to do that really successfully.

I think we have to learn to do that without falling prey to huge fears

and falling prey to huge anxieties and being stymied by the kind of, yeah.

The imaginary realm, if you like the realm of the imaginary.

which kind of in a sense, I guess, is the realm of the magic too.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

It's where magic lives certainly.

And so without the tools, without the practices, without the kind of means to

let the kind of magic find form elsewhere, that's the place where you, we get, you

know, the dangers you get consumed by it.

Yeah.

You get done down by it, I think.

And Everything becomes quite scary because it is a Pandora's box.

You know, the digital space is a Pandora's box at all.

All street fights, all wars, all pornography and gambling is there

the other side of the screen all the time continually available to us.

And like I say this, even if you take the small matter of the amount

of emails you get trying to fool you into partying with your money, even

that it's just like it's every day trying, someone's tried to cheat you.

And, And that, that in itself is an extraordinary thing to have to deal

And to that, I mean, that kind of suggests a kind of a much broader,

wider corruption, doesn't it?

I mean, so I kind of a, sort of, a society, which sort

of eating itself in a sense.

uh, When that is the kind of norm

And actually it's not that many people, it's just that via bots, they can

reach hundreds of millions of people with a single push of a keystroke.

They can reach out, hundreds of millions of people's emails addresses with the

same attempted story about a failed delivery parcel or whatever it might be.

But also all this I find deeply interesting, and it's the same old,

you know, storytelling, the enemies of the co-operative effort have

always been the same and they're the baddies of our storytelling.

And that's the thief, the bully, the cheat and the freeloader,

the free rider, the person who, doesn't do the washing up basically.

And these are the they're coming out us all the time.

And but they're now coming at us, just they used to be just there

as human beings, but now they're faceless kind of digital initiatives.

If you like, perpetrated by individuals still by human hand.

But via this extraordinarily expensive kind of network.

So I guess does the um, uh, and this is obviously a big job, not just for

you, does the, the, the cooperator for, you know, your, your, the lovely

phrase, the kind of reciprocal altruism.

Does this need the story, this needs the kind of telling of this story

that is forceful and strong enough to counter the kind of the white and

insidiousness of the, you know, the lost

Yeah.

And I guess what I'm hoping for the module is it becomes that story.

If you were to give my overarching and you know, massively vainglorious

ambition for the module is that the module becomes the story.

So in other words, the module itself becomes the story that, that helps us,

that gives us all sane group that has a handle on this enormously life-changing

period that we're going through.

I guess the community where we've met the deep transformation, because in a

sense those ideas need uh, you know, that, that needs story too, does it?

It's a thing that kind of binds everybody together, which I guess

is partly about rules, partly about common principles, partly about shared

identity and something which transcends.

So one of my say citations from Jeremy Lent was this business of this

transformation that has to happen now is the equivalent to the industrial

revolution or the birth of agriculture.

It's an enormous society-wide change.

And the major differences he points out is it's those other ones,

if you count the invention of agricultural industrial revolution,

we merely had to follow our own self-interest and that change happened.

But now we have to do exactly the opposite.

We have to go against off self-interests.

We have to give up our car, we have to reduce our electricity consumption.

We have to do things that are really quite self-sacrificing.

And for that, you need a story.

You know, You need a story that sort of self-sacrifice is quite easy.

If you have the story if you have the story of what it is, you will,

we are all willing to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good it's

it's a great asset as humanity.

And that's why and, and the lovely thing is that actually, as Jeremy Lent's network

the deep transformation network, there are, there are many of such networks.

The danger is that there are so many of them that they actually fragment

the power of a single network.

And I think that's the danger.

So everyone, well, everyone's starting a network.

So there are a million tiny network, but if only they all merged together would

create a huge human force of impact.

And so I do think that's one of the challenges, if you like for networks,

for the growth of networks in the future is how are we going to actually.

If you look at, if you look at studies for the, for drugs, if you look at

a new drug for an illness, you know, you'll have 30 different studies may

be testing the effects of a particular drug and, they're peer reviewed and

they're set up with, they've got all the qualifications for proper reviews,

but actually the most useful one is the one that joins them altogether.

You know what I mean?

So that all the reviews.

All the peer reviews all added together.

And then that becomes much more accurate by virtue of it

having a much larger sampler.

And so that, that kind of process, that sort of mechanism, if you like

that common to say the kind of mycelial network and how kind of things work there?

Yeah.

I mean mycelial networks are kind of, they are magical in their own right.

And this is the area where I know least.

And so, you're going to have to come back to me in a few months time when

I've done a lot more research but the way in which they, you know, I mean,

there are obviously many, there are many different species of fungus, but

the way in which they cooperate with other species to crow for the benefit

of both themselves and that species is really well, it's the story of evolution.

It is how it is, how most forests grow in that survived, is by virtue

of the fungal networks that help roots extract benefit from soil.

They couldn't do it by themselves, and the fungal networks couldn't

do it without the tree roots.

And so they're completely, their fates are closely aligned and

embedded, they literally live and it's a form of reciprocal altruism.

You scratch my back and that's what networks should do.

If I'm better off by joining, you know, a million networks together, then each of

those networks becomes much stronger by virtue of being part of the bigger whole.

So I hope to be maybe come back and visit again when I'm much more

eloquent about the actual details of especially if the fungal networks.

even more eloquent, not much more because you've been extremely eloquent.

I think one of the, they just, I guess, as a kind of final thought, cause it

was you, the seed you are planted there.

Cause as Jeremy talks around the, uh, the industrial revolution, but

he also kind of makes the, uh, the kind of observation that, you know,

people who are a hundred years into the industrial revolution before it

was kind of given the name of that.

So actually all of this kind of change potentially is happening.

Uh, and under, you know, which has made me kind of bubbling up in the

forms of many many networks and something else we were talking about.

The other thing, which sort of, you know, is is the opportunity for agency.

And whilst you make the, the kind of excellent point, actually we're not

working in our interests, but equally that we can have agency, and we were

talking about this in the context of of students and be kind of your willingness

and ability and interest in just trying and making connections, because in a way

the, you know, the networks we formed are the, some of the connections, you know?

And so the more that we kind of foster that the more that we work towards

that, you know, whether it's two people talking, whether it's two people

introducing a third and actually kind of the multiplicity of that lens,

real strength to the movement too.

Absolutely.

Well, Sam.

Thank you very much.

It would be very, very good to to have you back.

Um, you you can do the research on the internet with some, by the

time you're done that, I actually would have read Merlin Sheldrake's

book, rather than it just sitting somewhere on the shelf up there.

It's actually a really wonderful book.

It's completely as incredibly gripping and um, yeah, so I look forward to

Del beans aspect of it a lot more.

I Hope you enjoyed that conversation with professor Sam.

If you liked it or, you know, if he didn't like it, please share it.

Share it with someone who might like it as much as you.

Share it with someone who might dislike it as much as you.

Either way, that's the lifeblood of this venture.

This little adventure is sharing the work.

So please feel free to share.

If you're interested in what we're doing, you can find all of the other,

all of the other interviews uh, on the website, buddhaontheboard.com.

Go look for Peripheral Thinking there.

And of course, on all your favorite podcast channels.

Go check it out, be sharing, be merry, and we look forward

to speaking to you next time.