 Hi, so very, very warm welcome. It is my pleasure and delight to be hosting this Q&A today with the author of Breaking Together, Professor Gem Bandel. Today marks the launch of the free e-book version of Gem's new book, Breaking Together. And it's released today to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the publication Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, which is appropriate because Gem's book is published by the Schumacher Institute, and so recognizing that lineage, that heritage. Professor Gem Bandel is best known for his viral paper on climate change called Depadaptation, which was released almost five years ago now. And the influence of that paper on the growth, the early growth of extinction rebellion. He formerly worked for the UN, for WWF and for many corporations on sustainability issues, before shifting five years ago to focus on adaptation to unfolding societal disruption and even collapse. So we're joined here by people who have been, some people here have been following and supporting and influenced by Gem's work since before the publication of the Depadaptation paper. Yeah, and those who have joined the Depadaptation forum and have come across his work from elsewhere. So it's a really, really great pleasure to be here with you all. And Gem, thanks for joining, thanks for all you do. How are you? Thank you, Katie. So I was a bit nervous. This is the first online Q&A that I'm doing about the book. And I say that it might actually be the only one I'm going to do. But seeing very familiar faces and also this format, which I know quite well in the sort of emphasising Depadaptation and the Q&A dialogue, I'm having some nostalgia, so feeling good to be here. Thank you. Yeah, nostalgia here as well, having accompanied you through the Depadaptation forum in part of this journey. So you've spent the last two and a half years researching and writing, breaking together. And it is quite a weighty tome. I haven't quite finished it. I have been, the EPUB is available, but the audio book is also available and audible. And I have been kind of jumping between the two and taking, I have found taking breaks in between. So it's a powerful book. It's a powerful message. I'm wondering what you hope that the impact of this book is going to be. So I had to plug in my headphones as I got a message that my audio wasn't loud enough. So I missed the back end of your question because I was there. So please just repeat that. Sure. The question is what do you hope that the impact of this book is going to be? Yeah. And you mentioned the time it took to do it. So wow. So my intention for this book is completely different from when I started on this project. So two and a half years ago, I got funded by a foundation when the idea was about how do we bring more people into a conversation about societal disruption and collapse? And when I say more people, there was an interest from the funder and me at the time about more sort of senior ranking people in civil society, business, government, international organizations and so on. And because it had been quite a taboo subject and then when it had exploded, it had sort of been effectively demonized in mainstream media. And yet we knew so many people who it was their sort of their personal private secret truth that publicly they would talk about technological change and market mechanisms and hope, hope, hope, we can do this. And privately, they were scared and but they also didn't know how to talk about their private truth publicly. And so the original idea was I was going to do research that would help me write a book which would help more senior leaders engage in this professionally and publicly. However, as we I worked with a team of people in a variety of different disciplines. And over time, I discovered that actually maybe my deep adaptation paper and ideas and framing wasn't radical enough, because I discovered that actually, there's a good case to make that society modern societies, industrial consumer societies had already started to break down since around 2015. And, and that there are already a lot of regressive responses underway from authorities, basically panicked authorities, and I discovered there's a lot of psychology and sociology on why that happens. And so suddenly I was discovering sort of more of a anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian sentiment that I wanted to communicate. I really wanted to help people who were a bit suspicious of how global elites were responding to the growing sense of crisis. I wanted to share that there's a different way. We don't have to just rely on billionaires and technology and senior bosses to somehow come to the rescue. In fact, that's not going to work. And so the book was, has become about a people's environmentalism, a freedom loving response to the situation, as a result of all that my own journey over the last two and a half years. So what do I want from the impact? I don't actually care about senior leaders responding positively to this agenda or this book. My aim is quite different now. I'm wanting to help affirm the doubt suspicious suspicions of a lot of activists, a lot of people who want to see a more collaborative, dialogic response to what's going on. I'm actually quite excited about how some, for example, some of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion are responding. And other people who I know quite well, I think it's really helping them understand what's going on. Thank you. You're not an uncontroversial figure. That's double negatives. Yeah, you haven't shied away from speaking truth. And there is a really, really, there's a really strong message. The book, I have really, really appreciated some, particularly some of the parts, I think it's some of your most powerful writing that I've read so far. So well done. And there is also, there's a kind of ferocity in this book. You did mention that you've some of the positive response, particularly from the, from some of the founders from Extinction Rebellion. But I'm wondering about, yeah, more broadly, how is it being received so far? Do you feel like it's, it's hitting where you want it to, yeah, landing where you want it to land? Yeah. I'm really excited about how it seems to be a shot in the arm in a good way for people who get it already, who already have an instinctive sense of fairness and justice, and defence of human rights, along with a deep concern for the environment, along with a suspicion that monetary and economic systems as the modern manifestation of deeper systems around patriarchy, for example, people who have all that already, how they are, yeah, I'm seeing a confidence in the way that they communicate, either in articles or on social media, using some of the terminology and ideas in my book. I'll give you one example. Matthew Slater, who was a colleague with me in the Deep Adaptation Forum, has just written an article on lowimpact.org, and he knows my book because he's the audiobook narrator. So he had to read the whole thing, poor guy, closely. And, but yeah, his most recent article I think came out just yesterday, critiquing the rise of green authoritarianism in the British environmental movement. There's a lucidity there and a sense that this needs to be said, we need to invite people to a more bottom-up environmentalism rather than the top-down one. So I'm, I'm pleased with that. I don't see this as a book which is likely to be a bestseller, as you said Katie, it's, it's pretty heavy going, it's a long book. So what I'm looking for is like more people to really get a sense of, wow, okay, yeah, this affirms what I thought I knew, it puts it all together in one framework, in one place, and they're going to go for it. And I'm, and I am, I'm hearing that from, you know, people that, as I mentioned, Stu, Stu Bazden, Gail Bradford, and other people who've been key in the contemporary environment, British environmental movement. I hope this book has an impact beyond that, perhaps even beyond environmentalism. Because so many people who haven't been involved in environmentalism are waking up to the severity of the climate crisis, but they're also a bit spooked with the nature of the COVID, the mainstream COVID response. And so there are seeing these concerns grow that we might see an authoritarian response dominating for climate change. This shows that you can be an environmentalist in a different way. And so I hope it reaches some of those people too. Yeah, thank you. I get the impression, and I've got the impression, as I've been reading it, that there's, like, there's genuine fear in you around the emergent authoritarian or proto-fascist responses. It feels like a kind of call to action or, yeah, is that, is that right? Is that part of your motivation? Yes, there is a genuine fear in me. As, as the response to COVID seemed to be quite authoritarian, and the, even just discussing what may or may not work seem to be demonised or hidden, I did worry that people might become alienated from messages about what, about public threats. I did worry, therefore, there might actually, as a result of that, be a backlash against environmentalism per se. And we certainly are seeing that. And that was very predictable. And it was why I was pained to not see more environmental leaders and top commentators speak out about, well, maybe we need to check what the science is rather than just accept what the pharmaceutical companies say the science is. And we need to look at more holistic responses, proportionate responses. We need to keep talking about this rather than just having this sort of rather weird polarisation. So yes, there is fear in me, possibly because of the COVID period and this sense of intense polarisation over the last few years. I personally experienced a lot of people who've been quite vitriolic towards me, who sort of have been both in private and in public. So yes, I do worry that as panic grows, as anxiety grows about real problems in the world, the environmental crisis and the climate crisis being front and centre, but also all sorts of problems with poverty. And as anxiety grows, people can be open to manipulation to the very simple kind of there to blame. And so I talked about that in my speech when I launched the book in Glastonbury, that we seem to have on the one hand a real ecological crisis and on the other hand a sort of a fake green globalist response. And a lot of people are just screaming in either of those two directions like crisis or fake green globalist. And my book is inviting people to move through that and beyond that kind of emotion of just blame and hatred. And actually, well, it's can we can we find something more constructive to do together? And I call that a freedom loving response to collapse and very deliberately so I recognise some people would be alienated with that from that subtitle because over the last 40 years, freedom has been sort of assumed to be somehow the preserve of the right. But that's a particular affliction of the in the West. I mean, in countries where they've more recently shaken off colonial power and still struggle against colonial power, no one thinks that freedom is just about consumer behaviour. I care about me and not about my neighbour. That's just a nonsense that's emerged in the West through neoliberalism in the last few decades. Thank you. I want to join some dots before I do. I want to send give a reminder to people here that you can submit, you can send in if you have a question that you'd like to ask, Jim, you can send a direct message to Stuart. Yes, please do be good to hear from you. I'm very happy we have about 85, 85 on this on this Q&A today. So I do hope we get to hear from some of you. Thank you. Yes, and I wanted to connect with what you were saying about the response that you're proposing in this new book as a kind of an antidote to the effect of growing fear and how it's bringing about increasing polarisation and the global trauma effect of the pandemic. We're going to see more of similar kind of collective trauma events. Nadine Andrews is here, we spoke to Nadine maybe a couple of years ago about the trauma in the context of adaptation to climate chaos. Your approach or the approach that mainly you put forward in the in deep adaptation and in the forum has been maybe we could generalise the saying it's about exploring methods of co-regulation through connection and community. And I'm curious about the extent to which this book is a development of or a departure from that approach in deep adaptation. Yeah, I do see that as the most important part of the deep adaptation paper message and community and it is the most important part because that's the bit that people picked up on and really went with and it's also what I needed at the time. I was also I think in a bit of an emotional mess with all my old stories of self and the future and professional identity all being mixed up messed up and so and I had a real desire to serve that moment to help connect people, provide a framework for dialogue and invite people to realise that rushing to have some kind of answer to this whether that's a technological fix or a bunch of people to blame that's not actually that's all just emotional aversion that's not staying with the pain. So yes I'm happy with that characterisation however I always thought that that we might see a lot more in terms of an emerging political agenda around this from people who are collapse aware or collapse accepting and that's been slower to emerge and also I realised that the political scene is dominated by messaging through mass media and through by politicians and therefore I noticed that quite a lot of people despite being very active in this co-regulation thing were still I thought sometimes saying things which I thought were politically unhelpful and I thought well rather than rather than just wait for a political philosophy to emerge kind of like a politics of compassion solidarity and fairness and equality to emerge for an agenda or an era of collapse rather than the era of assumed progress rather than just waiting for that to emerge I'd have a go you know okay like I think I I've got something to say on this and I I think I had to let go of the idea that I have to somehow be neutral on this and and I just said these are my ideas take them all leave them this is my contribution to a a collapse ready politics so it's I like to think that it's not coming from any emotional aversion in me I like to think that it's what I've gained from the whole deep adaptation way of being the people I know in that field has helped me then do this next thing which is more explicitly political I often talk when someone asks me often about the difference between the da stuff in the book so because it is a question that comes up I say well perhaps the da stuff was quite yin and this book is a bit more yang in terms of how I'm relating to the situation thank you there are a couple of people here from who are in the the deep adaptation community and I'm going to go to a couple of them who have questions for you but before we do I have another question which is yeah the the book covers so many different topics from banking to spirituality to mutual aid politics if which of the chapters do you think people most need to read and why yeah thanks so it depends where people are coming from I often say that it's funny isn't it I've been talking about this damn book for two months now but not in a not in an event like this but I'm just realizing I'm talking to lots of people about the book so I'm often saying well the book the first half is marshalling the evidence for the argument that the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies has already begun it can't be changed we can talk about reducing harm and that's very important to do and the second half of the book is then so why did this happen and what to do about it and also what not to do about it what we might be able to resist okay so if you doubt the premise then we get stuck into the first half where I talk about the breakdown in economic systems monetary systems energy systems food systems biosphere and then also climate as an accelerator of all that as well as being a problem in itself and then there's a chapter talking about the various different cracks in various different aspects of society more on the surface reflecting lots of opinion polls about how now people are thinking about government and capitalism and so on but if yeah if you already accept that premise then okay for those of you who may be feeling kind of ashamed to be part of the human race so that's quite a thing that crops up with people who are a bit doomy um and you have days where you're feeling a bit misanthropic like ah good riddance to the human race planet earth will be the best without us then I recommend chapters nine and ten because chapter nine I look at how for many millennia human societies that were very complex but complex in different ways not only lived sustainably and in harmony with nature but were actually essential to the biodiversity so for example the various different civilizations were now beginning to learn about the lived in the amazon and made the amazon what it is today but I give lots of examples and so basically no it's not that homo sapiens didn't belong here we do belong here it's just a particular uh a particular ideology culture and then set of economic systems which then took that to extremes particularly focused on the monetary system which is chapter 10 and I show how it took um very alienated and alienating stories of reality and of humans within that reality took those and made them extreme and took away our freedom to live and think to think and live differently and so I talk about the unfreedom that comes from that monetary system um so I would recommend chapters nine and ten and then it can be like okay so you know homo sapiens as a species um it wasn't inevitable that this happened a lot of people were there fulfilled a bit upset with that um I know a lot of people don't want to think like that because then they worry they might feel some guilt and some shame or they may go into just sort of an angry blame mode against the the richest people in the world well drop all that just drop all those fears of blame and guilt and whatever just drop it all and just just allow yourself to consider this information and then just find a way of living where you're not driven by any of the either aversion to guilt and shame or or attraction to blaming others the other chapter then um that I think is really important is chapter eight on something which I'm summarizing with a phrase critical wisdom or the new term critical wisdom and that's because I think that um we need to help each other to be wise in this moment and for me that involves a blend of lots of different things and lots of different ways of being and knowing so mindfulness obviously so we become aware of how our cravings and aversions to different emotions are actually involved in the micro moments of how we perceive the world and what we think is a true claim or not or what's right or wrong so to cultivate some mindfulness and there's many ways to do that um uh secondly something I'm calling critical literacy but also that's a term in sociology uh where we become aware of how power works in shaping uh concepts narratives and stories in society and how that then reproduces that power and then unless we're conscious of that we end up just be so easily manipulated obviously some sociologists say that's an impossible thing we'll never escape that we're actually constituted by that discursal power but I think still we should try and cultivate awareness of it to avoid manipulation increasing at this time um and then there's um rationality a lot of people take I think perhaps you know I live in in in a community I live in a town where a lot of people might take um those two things so far where they drop all interest in logic um and so I think it's very important to be aware of logical uh logical fallacies uh and understand rationality I'm certainly not um I'm building from science with a critical eye rather than negating it so I'm quite uh I'm quite I quite like rationality and logic and then the fourth thing is that intuition so there's all manner of ways of knowing the world other than not only through the through language and and and maths and so on but also and not even through our brains but through um and it may even not even be through our bodies so um I encourage people if you've never had it before to immerse yourself in nature to consider things like fasting to consider things like micro dosing to consider things like extended my periods of meditation not just for mindfulness but for transcendent states uh and not to negate that or or think that poo poo that but actually recognize that as one of the four pillars of the kind of cultivating wisdom in these times that's chapter eight thank you uh yeah comprehensive there and there is um we've got a question coming up later about um the uh let me just find I'm going to come to Natalie not a straightaway but a question about the specifics and this is the research um the first half of the book which is your research so we'll we'll come to that shortly um first I would like to invite um Kimberley welcome Kimberley if you're still here with you unmute yourself and um ask your question to James good to see you yeah good to see you too hi jam um so I had an original question and it's kind of slightly evolved since since you've been talking um it was I mean I love the book thank you so much it's brilliant um and I love the breaking together angle um and the emphasis on we rather than I and there's still a feeling and a sense in the book for me um about naming the enemy in terms of other humans and uh and I wonder if if you feel we can ever achieve a kind of pro-life any kind of pro-life uh future um if we continue to to perceive other humans as bad or wicked rather than the compassion which you know you you've taught me so much about the love and the compassion required to understand that it's a kind of bad and wicked system rather than bad and wicked people and I'm so struck recently by the uh my own shift shift towards away from the individual and towards you know uh we towards what we can do together yeah so I just wondered what you what you thought about that that yeah the sense in which um if we just changed these individual people you know what I mean yes thank you Kim and I just want to say that I I see some people are sending messages into the general chat or even I think maybe messaging me I I I won't see those so if you want to ask a question send it to directly to Stuart Smith so if I can do that thank you so yeah Kim um it's it's uh so I'm a professor of leadership and one of the most famous studies in the 80s on leadership was how um when things are going particularly well or particularly badly uh across cultures psychology studies find that we uh if things are going better or worse than expected than the norm we tend to blame or praise the senior role holder the person with power we perceive even if we have absolutely no evidence for that um and it's just the fact that the health psychology works um and so when we see things going badly now yeah it's a lot easier to say get super angry at the chairman of the world economic forum uh and say you know Claus Schwab must be an evil man who's in charge of the planet working with Bill Gates uh rather than look at the complex systems which are destroying the planet uh and therefore if you know what's it Claus Schwab is must be about 19 now he might be he might even die tomorrow nothing's going to change Bill Gates could you know slip up and bang his head and and never never give a grant or a speech again and nothing would change so this is this is key we need to definitely look at the systems rather than get so fixated on on on individuals and but there is this tendency it's a lot easier it also it works in a way where um we don't then look at our own complicity in those systems and so I talked about that in my launch speech um when I I look back at my own career and I spent prior to 2017 so 22 years of my career in sustainability I spent the whole time basically looking up the tree looking up the hierarchy uh who has power where's the power how can I get their ear how can I be their confidant how I can get them to do the right things thinking that was the most responsible thing to do um and actually I I realized that um we make so many compromises about our own uh curiosity and our own sense of what's reality in doing that and we stop looking at each other and we stop thinking about our you know how to team up with our neighbors or or those around us and so I'm yeah I'm for me that's quite a big big message in the book I want to one actually I'm gonna hold it up here so you see if you get the real one it's so today you can download for free the epub just go to jenbandale.com and there you go you download it for free but it's far nicer to hold it because it's got this beautiful piece of art which I did with Durinca Montego now there's a reason for this which relates to your question so this is the Farnese Atlas um who's a Titan god and and um but it's it's been Kintsugi so Kintsugi is the ancient Japanese art of when something breaks um you stick it back together again with gold and but you're not you're not thinking you can use it for what it once was so when you you know you have an antique mug which you love dearly I mean you were using for to drink green tea for for in your family for a century and you break it when you stick it back together again you're not going to use it for that it's just going to be an ornament but it reminds you of your not only the object of what it was useful but it reminds you of your love for that but recognizing that it's broken so I've done that here because the the myth of Atlas has the true meaning of it has been lost um over time where people think this is the planet when it's not it's the the the heavens the universe in general and people have lost the idea that that Zeus cursed um Atlas with the idea that he had to hold up the heavens to stop them collapsing and so is Atlas what a lovely Atlas represents an aspect of our humanity it's wonderful that we care and we don't want our family and the rest of humanity to die under collapsing heavens um but it's also pure hubris and self-obsession that we think that we have to do that and so there's a paradox it's good that we care about people and and the world beyond ourselves but also there's a paradox in that they can go horribly wrong so we don't resolve that paradox you don't resolve that paradox by saying oh that's everyone be entirely free of only so any social consideration or or um you don't resolve the paradox by just hoping that some superhuman ethical dictator can fix it and tell us what all what to do for our own good you just have to recognize this is a paradox of human nature so um that's why it's on the cover we're gonna still let let's keep caring for each other in the world and the heavens and all sorts but also recognize how that could go terribly wrong because it always does go terribly wrong so that also connects back Katie to when I talked about my concern about green authoritarianism and inviting a different party thank you thanks Kimberley good to see you Annette are you still here I'm still here Katie um lucky third um hi lovely to see you and hi Gem um I asked this question in Glastonbury and felt that I didn't really get an answer to it because Gail responded by saying oh that's what I'm talking about in my talk and then and then she gave a great talk but I didn't feel she really covered this which is um it's related to the one disappointment of the day was that Stephen Wright wasn't there I really looked forward to hearing from him I had been to meet him um at his place in Cumbria and we talked about all of this and the idea of addressing the cause beneath the cause of really trying to help support people reconnecting to source or God or the divine however you want to name it um yeah so I'm wondering what's your take on on that the kind of spiritual aspect of all this um as well as what would you have hoped that he would have said if it's not really your thing um what would you have hoped he just had to say about that thank you um well I just would have hoped that Stephen would have been Stephen we could have all just look curated in his compelling mysticism but um yeah one of his well his closest colleague and friend had a personal tragedy just two days before that event and say he's went to be with her right yeah I I um actually Stephen Wright has finished a first draft of a whole book on deep adaptation and spirituality so there's that to come and um but I'll answer for myself um I'm not I'm not going to take you up on what would I want him to say or okay that's that's fine that's fine you know now uh back to the paradox um if if in if from um 2015 to 2017 if from 2015 to 2016 I hadn't been paying attention to the latest climate news and data I have become extremely worried so worried I needed to take a year out from university to study the climate science again for myself rather than just assuming what IPCC said was was correct um if I hadn't done that I wouldn't have had my dark night of the soul and I wouldn't be who I am today um and I therefore probably would have been still a corporate sustainability worker holic still working from the idea that it's good to get people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons and one just has to keep pretending and behaving according to what's expected of me as a as a someone who's a high-ranking professional successful guy um so the weird thing is is that me me yeah coming to that uh awareness not just of my own mortality it's kind of like multi-dimensional mortality so it's the extent of the loss of other life and species the extent of suffering of humans now the extent of how much is to come the you know the the biological annihilation which is already beginning which is going to continue we can't do anything much about um the very possibility of human extinction caused by ourselves all of this was um yeah this was huge for me and um melted my or fractured my old stories of self and identity um it even revealed to me that I was operating from a a story of self where I need to have self-worth and I get self-worth by being a smart guy who cares and works hard and it smashed all of that and what was I left with I was left with um something else which is and and and many spiritual teachers talk about that where you you have that disintegration of self and then what you what are you your your consciousness your part of you're just a a bit of something infinite um and uh and there's a core truth of just being loving and and curious um that was what dominated dominated for me being loving and being curious so um so it's a paradox because would I have wanted everything to be fine in the world or for me to not have known about it like you know so many in the people in the world most people in the world perhaps don't know about this stuff and don't face it um it's it's it's a weird one because because I think liberation can come through facing this reality and let it change you um and lots of people talk about that too when I talk about it in chapter 12 of the book I talk about a few people where it really did um change them in that way and they would frame they would describe it in terms of it being a an awakening moment so the spiritual thing being quite big for them I talk about Zori uh in in chapter 12 for example crucial in in her evolution I'm reading the thank you I I haven't got that far yet so I'll make sure to get there thank you gem that was I found that so that's moving to you about thank you yeah and um the as I'm listening to you speaking gem then what I noticed is the the energy shifting uh from like it's possible to engage in this topic in a in a cognitive way we're talking about ah chapter 12 on this and chapter 7 on this and how it's impacting and what people can do and then um yeah dropping down into the the more personal like remembering this is real and every single one of the 89 people here today are we're holding it in our hearts and in our bodies in different and challenging ways um and in a few minutes we're going to um pause with the q&a and uh and go into break our rooms to to connect in a kind of more intimate way um and share a little bit but before we do that uh jessica's back jessica let's see if if the weather at your end is going to let us hear your question thank you katie uh thank you gem for your book and for creating the space for us to discuss um these critical ideas um and I yes I'm in the caribbean so it's windy hurricane season so I might lose connection in your chapters um I found them really obviously critical but the one that was seemed to be missing for me was one on education and uh especially education in the global north um I have a 19 year old daughter who's going to be attending her first year of university at university of british columbia she's chosen to be in the north and um I wanted to know your thoughts maybe two or three points on what you think that post-secondary school institutions should be doing to equip our young people to meet these uh unbelievable challenges and this very uncertain and worsening future and and do you feel um in your heart of hearts that these institutions are even capable of uh supporting and uh meeting the needs of young people so anything you have on that would be great thank you yeah wow 19 you said yeah so um yeah the deep adaptation edited book had a chapter on education and you're right I don't talk about it um in this book um I don't really get specific about any real pop I don't get specific about policy areas more it's political philosophy rather than that I I am well there's two ways of going one is live life to the max and that's different for whoever else whoever it is so your 19 year old living life to the max might be you know if she's passionate about a certain subject and wants to go to a certain place in the world and have that experience then great but I think it will do nothing to help her um I I'm not a parent and if I was I'd be I'd be choosing a very different I'd be encouraging my child because it depends on what age um but to to to buck the traditional education system entirely um because yeah you talked about in my heart of hearts no I I I think um there's there's a few schools some forest schools and stuff where they're very focused on not training people just to be little hard workers in industrial systems and you know tidy consumers um but I want wild revolutionaries in the world and that's what young people are and let's help them be that way in constructive ways um and so yeah people should be um all of us actually every one of us here as I I talk about it as a great reclamation of our power from the systems of imperial modernity so um I popped that guitar there it was actually slightly further out of view I just put it in there and it's because and the t-shirt I had made it says you know doomsday as we we grow our own food we make our own music we use our own currencies and we have more fun and it it's there's all manner of ways we can reclaim our lives aspects of our lives from imperial modernity which also therefore means let's make our own music um let's let's uh look at all ways that we can be have fun and be productive together outside of industrial consumer society I the vast majority perhaps all of our educations is is training people up to set for salaried labor within industrial consumer societies so I reject it all now and I guess I'm saying that because today marks the day where my line manager wrote back telling me that my uh my leaving the university has been confirmed so I'm leaving academia so professorship should be for life and I'm I'm quitting I'm going to focus on writing music and developing my organic farm school and other sorts of stuff so I'm I'm not just saying this I've had it with a lot of academia so I don't know what you should do with I'll say to you sir maybe you're 19 year old might be interested in my book well well thank you gem and she she actually read um the collapsologists um another end of the world is possible she took that on her trip to Costa Rica um and she grew up in the rainforest in the Caribbean so now she wants to try to see what uh what the north is like and I I want her to experiment and to be free to make choices after that too yeah so I totally understand and that that's what I was saying is live like living life to the max as people feel it at that time and that's where she's at so good luck thank you thank you for that yeah so that's there like beautifully connects with the the invitation that I want to yeah that offer you right now you're gonna um just it's a thought experiment maybe for maybe for fun um listening to to Jessica talk about her door to listen to gem talk about kind of what one aspect of freedom means and so you're going to be in a in a breakout room with um two other people most most of it's going to be you might find yourself with three other people and um this is the question I'm offering you if you knew that you had a year of life left what would you be doing so it's a thought experiment you know we can assume that these 12 months are not going to include a long and increasingly debilitating illness you have you have 12 months left all the people watching this on youtube are going to miss out on everything we're reading here aren't they they are relaxing to love to experience nature caring for the earth connection love and care some playing and fun leaving a viral legacy of love for humans in the more than human world so yeah um I actually I know this isn't you're the host but I just want to say something is that um it's just reminding me of of there are rare conversations which are deeply meaningful nourishing and can help resource us with the these difficult times I don't have it much in my life because I've been busy so stupidly busy for the past year writing a book but um I found these sorts of things happening in the deep adaptation forum um so I know lots of good lovely stuff happens there online as well increasingly again in person so for those of you who don't know about it check it out deepadaptation.info thanks gem um we're a little bit past the top of the hour so I'd like to say thank you to each of you for showing up um joining joining this event uh also thanks to each of you for showing up in all of the other ways um in your life in your work on this topic gem thank you for yeah your huge generosity I know that not everything that you do on this topic in this work is uh joyful for you and yeah I'm I'm really grateful and I know that that thank you is on behalf of a lot of people people who are here and also people who haven't been able to join us today um the uh recording of this Q&A will be on gem's youtube channel gem where can people um get a copy of your book including the paid for copy um if people can afford to buy a copy then yeah there's a there's a there's a pinned uh post on gem bendel.com which then links to uk paperback direct from the publisher shoemaker uh as well as um amazon paperback and amazon hardback and also the audiobook and for purchasing but also if you go to soundcloud and type gem bendel then you'll arrive at my soundcloud account and there's about six of the chapters audio for free and about every two to three weeks I'll write a blog and I'll release another chapter audio there until they're all out so that's another way of consuming it in chunks but yeah the free epub it's there today gem bendel.com you'll see a link that to download it and have it on your e-reader please tell people about it it's uh yeah it's I people are telling me this this can be life-changing um like helping in personal transformations so and it's not something that will necessarily get written about in mass media other than to slag it off because it's too frightening um a political scientist I know told me gem what you're doing is probably the most counterhegemonic thing I didn't even know I pronounced that right I had counter hegemonic hegemonic don't know thing that he knew there you go from political scientist shakes things up a bit and so it should this society this this culture became suicidal didn't it so uh we're waking up to that thank you gem bendel.com you won't get a follow-up email from this event so please do take some time to to have a look at the link yourself and um until next time thank you so much thank you gem thanks stewart for your support