In our first episode of 2025, we get inspired by Anthony Galluzzo ’s Against the Vortex to watch the cult 1974 movie Zardoz , featuring Sean Connery in what appears to be a prototype for the mankini. In Galluzzo’s book, Zardoz features as a surprisingly prescient story for thinking about techno-utopias (or dystopias), degrowth and deceleration in the 21st century, as well as bringing into view an under-recognised current of “critical Aquarianism” in 1970s counterculture, distinct from both the s...
Apr 30, 2025•1 hr
This episode is the podcast version of a live event a few weeks ago , hosted by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, where I joined Vanessa Andreotti – who some of you will know as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira – to wonder about what she is up to with AI. To say it came as a surprise when Vanessa mentioned that she had co-written a book with an AI bot called Aiden Cinnamon Tea… well, that would be an understatement. Here, she shares more about why GTDF has chosen to work with AI an...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 34 min
As Ed says at the end of our final episode of 2024, “Have yourself a mythic little Christmas!” We close the year with a wandering conversation about folklore, myth, modernity as being “away with the fairies” and hopefully bringing back something of worth from the journey. Show Notes * Ed’s new book of poetry, The Father’s Road , is available now through Etsy. * Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees . * Alan Garner’s Collected Folk Tales . * Martin Shaw ’s Westcountry School of Myth . *...
Dec 16, 2024•1 hr 4 min
My guest in this episode is Jay Cousins , an inventor, recovering entrepreneur and carrier of questions, an old friend from my Sheffield days, who has been based for the past ten years or so in Dahab, Egypt. This conversation came about because Jay wrote to me with a set of thoughts that build on the unfinished list of “Four Tasks for a Time of Endings” from the closing pages of At Work in the Ruins . The original set of tasks goes like this: * Salvage the good things we have a chance of taking ...
Dec 12, 2024•1 hr 20 min
In this episode, we chew on a question that’s been on Dougald’s mind since a recent event in London, where Brian Eno wondered what is the difference between an analysis which says we cannot save or make sustainable the trajectories of industrial modernity and technological progress, and an accelerationist position which says we need to bring about collapse in order to release the possibilities to be found in the ruins? What would a “decelerationist” politics look like? Shownotes * Derek Gow, Bir...
Nov 19, 2024•55 min
In this episode of Homeward Bound, I’m talking to Isabelle Drury , author of the Substack Finding Sanity . I wanted to talk to Isabelle because of a post she wrote back in July, describing a moment in her relationship, shaped by the way she had been dwelling on thoughts of climate catastrophe and societal collapse: I was discussing with my partner what our plans were for the next few years of our lives. What I imagine are the usual conversations one has when your future still seems wide open: ‘ ...
Nov 15, 2024•48 min
Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot. I see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. This episode starts with the traditional nursery rhyme commemorating the events of 5 November, 1605, when Catholic plotters attempted to blow up the British parliament. While we’re on the theme of memory and maps, a reminder that Dougald’s new online series, Pockets, Patterns & Practices , starts this week, with the question, “What kind of maps do we need now?” A...
Nov 05, 2024•57 min
“Maybe what we’re looking for is fewer robot vacuum cleaners and more compost toilets.” We stumble into a new series of The Great Humbling with an episode that revolves around s**t and technology. This is also our first video episode, so you can watch our beardy faces on Substack or YouTube. Shownotes * Ed’s been reading The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, alongside How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. * Also Andrei Kirkov’s Death and the Penguin . * Dougald talks about Em Strang’s nov...
Oct 23, 2024•52 min
Midway through last month’s North American tour, the filmmaker Katie Teague sat me down to record an interview. Sometimes an interview happens at just the right moment, when all the work you’re carrying is on the top of your tongue. That’s what happened here – so with Katie’s permission, we’re releasing an audio version of her edit of what I told her that morning. The result is more or less a solo show, since you don’t hear Katie’s questions and my answers come in stories rather than paragraphs....
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 9 min
In this episode, my guest is Dr Ashley Colby for a joint episode with her Doomer Optimism podcast . Ashley is hosting a weekend retreat around my work in Chicago as part of next month’s North American tour. * Read more & register for the Chicago Retreat: https://bit.ly/dougald-retreat * The rest of the American tour: https://dougald.nu/america/ Thanks for reading Homeward Bound! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. We talk about how long it is since I last visited the...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr 3 min
As the fifth season of The Great Humbling came to an end, we recognised that what we’ve been doing is letting you listen in on a conversation that we would want to have anyway – and this inspired us to expand the podcast, to bring you overheard conversations with other friends, co-conspirators and people who get us thinking. We’re calling this Homeward Bound, a title that started off as the name of the first online series that Dougald Hine taught with a school called HOME in 2020. For a few seri...
May 21, 2024•46 min
The end of this fifth series of The Great Humbling finds us looking back over the loose ends from earlier episodes, exploring the wider field of “Humility Studies” and asking who exactly we think we’re talking to, anyway? We start with Ed reporting back from The Fête of Britain , the inaugural festival of the Hard Art collective, which took place in Manchester last week, where he found himself hosting a gameshow whose panellists included Clare Farrell, Lee Jasper and the folk singer Jennifer Rei...
Feb 29, 2024•56 min
In our latest episode, Ed and Dougald compare notes on the experience of being founders – or co-founders – of organisations. What did we learn along the way? And what do humble forms of leadership look like? We were recording on Shrove Tuesday, so the episode kicks off with a discussion of seasonal customs, including the Swedish semla … On a recent Danish tour, Dougald returned to teach at the Kaospilots school , reconnecting with one of the inspirations that set him on the path of kickstarting ...
Feb 16, 2024•58 min
This is the episode where we finally left Skype, which we’ve for some reason been using to record these conversations for four and a half series. Switching off the lights as we go, Ed wonders about other examples of old systems and technologies that are still in use, such as Windows Submarine. Dougald reports back on his trip to Gothenburg – and makes an appeal for help in locating a copy of Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpes Battered , the tenth and final instalment in her saga about the terrible (an...
Feb 02, 2024•53 min
Here's a rundown of references from this episode... Leah Rampy, Earth & Soul: Reconnecting Amid Climate Chaos Bill Drummond, 45 David Mitchell, Unruly David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything Jay LeSoleil, 'Green' Elites vs Green Left Populism Avtryck/Imprint – a documentary from the Swedish Transition Towns movement Chris Smaje (from 2016), 'Why I'm still a populist despite Donald Trump: elements of a left agrarian populism' 'Desert' – an anonymous anarchist text, quoted in...
Jan 19, 2024•54 min
Our final episode of 2023 finds Dougald already in his Christmas jumper, as the tiredness of a busy year catches up with the pair of us. Ed opens a window on Sophie Howarth’s Lighting the Dark: An Advent Calendar . We share the Benjamin Zephaniah poems that have been going round in our heads, since the news of his death was announced, ‘To Do Wid Me’ and ‘Rong Radio Station’ and ‘Luv Song’ . Ed’s been reading a doorstop of a novel, The Deluge by Stephen Markley. Dougald has been revisiting the wo...
Dec 15, 2023•42 min
We take a different route into our conversation this time around, in what turns out to be the first in a two-parter woven around John Higgs’s book, The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds , which Ed has been reading. It’s the kind of book that detonates in the mind, sparking a million connections. First, though, we start out talking about humbling moments, great and small, prompted by Dougald’s experience of stumbling upon a conversation between two listeners who had ver...
Nov 30, 2023•53 min
We recorded this episode on Dougald’s birthday – and Ed starts with the image of him wearing Anna’s family’s Coyote coat , triggering unsettling flashbacks to the QAnon shaman, who is apparently now running for Congress. Welcome to the dark weirdness of 2023. Ed quotes from Paul Mason’s ‘Gaza: Time for Restraint’ , a story brought to our attention by listener Richard Brophy, about a conversation between George Orwell and Stephen Spender during the Second World War. Before we head further into th...
Nov 17, 2023•1 hr
Welcome back to Season 5 of The Great Humbling! Here are some show notes... The Regrowing a Living Culture series at a school called HOME starts on 7 & 8 November. Ed has been reading Dougie Strang’s book, The Bone Cave . Dougald mentions the cluster of authors who were part of the first decade of Dark Mountain who are stepping out with books of their own, finding their voice and getting the attention they deserve. This includes Dougie, also his wife Em Strang’s first novel Quinn , Nick Hunt...
Nov 01, 2023•55 min
In February this year, we took The Great Humbling into a new format, a live conversation on stage at Norwich Arts Centre as part of the UK tour that Dougald made to launch his book, At Work in the Ruins . It's taken us rather a long time to get the recording edited, but here it is at last. For this live show, Ed and Dougald were joined by two special guests. Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor, teacher and lover of all things rooted in Earth and sky. She works as co-director of the Dark Mounta...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr 15 min
We reach the end of Season 4 of The Great Humbling, though Ed and Dougald start the show with an invitation to a one-off live recording of a special episode with guests Rupert Read and Charlotte Du Cann for those who can join us in Norwich on 20 February . As always, we start off by talking about what we've been reading, listening to, watching, imbibing, or otherwise taking on board in ways that get us thinking. Ed has been reading a book called At Work in the Ruins by someone called Dougald Hin...
Feb 01, 2023•1 hr 2 min
So, here's what happened – after a long break, we sat down in early October to record the seventh episode of this series, but life got in the way and by the time we got around to editing it six weeks later, the world had changed so much that it felt like a historical document. Britain has (yet) another prime minister, Sweden has a government over which the far-right have an unprecedented influence. But here it is, in any case, 'the missing episode', so you can travel back in time and relive the ...
Nov 25, 2022•51 min
After twenty-nine episodes recorded through screens and cameras, Ed and Dougald find themselves meeting for the first time and sit down for a conversation beside the mill pond in Loddon, in the garden of the Mill of Impermanence. We hear the unlikely tale of how Dougald found Ed’s fiftieth birthday present, a copy of Uriah Heep’s fifth album, The Magician’s Birthday , while en route to a holiday in Great Yarmouth. A chain of serendipitous events leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Yarmouth ...
Jul 19, 2022•55 min
Dougald poses a big question for this episode: what do we believe in? Ed responds playfully and paradoxically with ‘self-delusion’, citing Robert Trivers work on self-deceit that includes gay pornography and erection-o-meters. And lasers. Here's his RSA talk . Dougald talks about the formative influence of spending the first two-and-a-bit years of his life in the grounds of a theological college and what happened when he told his Sunday school teacher that he didn't find Hell 'a particularly hel...
May 24, 2022•49 min
We started this podcast in the early weeks of the pandemic, talking about the stories circling around it. A crisis had come out of the corner of almost everyone's field of vision and became, within weeks, the only thing in the news. Two years on, something similar has happened, so we arrived at this episode wondering whether or not to talk about Ukraine. Dougald remembers Ivan Illich's short text, 'The Right to Dignified Silence' (in In the Mirror of the Past ), written in support of West German...
Mar 21, 2022•51 min
We’ve been listening back to the first episode we made , almost two years ago, in the early weeks of the time of Covid. Maybe it’s the influence of revisiting those early episodes, or maybe it has to do with Dougald turning up to our January recording with a glass of bubbly in hand, but we find ourselves ranging freely – and at some length – in this conversation we’re calling ‘Remapping Lava’. Before we get onto the main theme of the discussion, we bring back the tradition of asking each other w...
Jan 31, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This episode starts with a little reflection on our new more-or-less monthly schedule, and in the course of this episode, we talk about a few other podcasts: Ingrid Rieser's Forest of Thought Per Johansson & Eric Schüldt's Swedish-language Myter och mysterier Ed's other podcast, Jon Richardson & the Futurenauts The Sacred , a podcast from the think tank Theos presented by Elizabeth Oldfield We talk about COP26 and Ed mentions his recent TEDx Kings Cross talk, 'How We're Going to Solve Cl...
Dec 22, 2021•35 min
The Great Humbling is back for a fourth series of conversations between Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie, now as part of the wider patchwork of Homeward Bound. Our theme for this first episode is confessions, but we start by looking back over the summer that's gone. Ed offers us Carol Campayne 's seasonal map of responsible leadership with questions that follow the turning of the year: Spring: What's emerging? What are the new green shoots? Summer: What's blooming? What's in floral technicolor? Aut...
Nov 03, 2021•37 min
We begin with some listener feedback from last week’s ‘Get on your knees!’ about prayer… Before Dougald introduces our final instruction of the workout… Now Breathe! We talk about the beautiful, simple pleasures of a degree of lockdown emergence, how Build Back Better went from a call for a radical progressive alliance to seize the moment of the pandemic, to a slogan on Boris Johnson's podium, and Sam Conniff saying he fears our generation's greatest regret will be that we failed to seize this m...
May 27, 2021•54 min
Ed talks about Martin Shaw’s new book ‘Smokehole - looking to the wild in the time of the spyglass’ and the line ‘The mess out there is because of a mess in here’ Dougald discusses the difference between privilege, entitlement and the ‘work that is mine to do’ and references Alastair McIntosh’s four questions: "Does what I do feed the hungry?" "Is it relevant to the poor or to the broken in nature?" "Does it contribute to understanding and meaningfulness?" "Does it give life?" And there’s someth...
May 21, 2021•47 min
