Emerging Future Podcast

Michael Preston is a Master Waldorf Teacher. I consider him a Wisdom Elder, someone who has lived a life of curiosity and authenticity, and in doing so has learned much about the deeper insights and wisdom that life makes available to us. And I’m deeply grateful that he taught my son's class from 1st grade through 3rd grade before retiring.

At a young age, while pursuing his teaching degree, Michael was introduced to the work of Rudolph Steiner and Waldorf education. That was followed by a series of synchronistic events that gave him the inner assurance to pursue his life's work as a Waldorf educator.

He left his home in New Zealand at age 17, hitchhiked across Australia with a few dollars in his pocket, convinced the Head of Waldorf teacher training in England through a series of letters that he was ready and committed to Waldorf training, and then eventually made it to Emerson College in Sussex, England to begin his vocational studies.

In this conversation Michael reflects on his journey and eloquently provides context, educational philosophy, and depth in regards to Waldorf education. He reveals his love for humanity, particularly children, by telling his own story of development and search for a meaningful way forward.

Michael has committed his life to training children to be whole humans, capable of moving through the world with intellectual inquisitiveness, compassion, and through socialization and play. His love for education is grounded in a doctorate in philosophy of education, which makes this a colorful and poetic conversation.

Michael is also an accomplished ukulele player and recorder player. He has published numerous books on learning ukulele and will be releasing a recorder book to assist Waldorf educators in teaching recorder.

Michael has directly influenced me personally and my family as a whole. His thoughtfulness and caring approach to life has been imprinted on our family for ever.

The subject matter that Michael and I discuss in this conversation includes:

Waldorf education

The impact of technology on children

Screens as the modern form of transportation

Rudolph Steiner

Anthroposophical Medicine

Anthroposophical Society

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Primacy of Perception

[Unedited]

More of Robert's Story...

Robert's story of becoming an astrophysicist and studying at Princeton

Robert's journey of sustainability

Robert's first home made telescope

Robert's hand-built sustainable house in Sequim, WA

The start of In Context Magazine and the global network of authors

Robert's journey through the dark night of the soul, suddenly and traumatically losing his wife and becoming a single parent

Synopsis:

Dr. Robert Gilman is a man of man talents. As a Princeton-trained astrophysicist, sustainability pioneer, engaged citizen, and cultural change catalyst, he is adept at making sense of complexity and discerning the signal from the noise in most territories of life.

He founded the Context Institute in the 70s to explore more sustainable ways of living, and is now on a mission to create a global community of empowered change agents to help make a more graceful transition from the Empire Era to the Planetary Era (he explains those eras in the podcast) more graceful.

This requires understanding and embodying what he calls the 3 harmonies:

The harmony within ourselves

The harmony others

The harmony with nature

In his course, Bright Future Now, Robert facilities quarterly cohorts who meet virtually for six weeks to start learning and practicing the 3 harmonies, gain tools for the journey and a better understanding of our cultural context within this transition time.

As a recent graduate of the course I can’t recommend it enough. Not a day goes by where I don’t incorporate the content in my thinking and doing.

Check out Context.org to learn more about Robert and the Context Institute’s community of cultural change agents.

Dr. Robert Gilman is a man of many talents. As a Princeton-trained astrophysicist, sustainability pioneer, engaged citizen, and cultural change catalyst, he is adept at making sense of complexity and discerning the signal from the noise in most territories of life.

He founded the Context Institute in the 70s to explore more sustainable ways of living, and is now on a mission to create a global community of empowered change agents to help make a more graceful transition from the Empire Era to the Planetary Era (he explains those eras in the podcast) more graceful.

This requires understanding and embodying what he calls the 3 harmonies:

The harmony within ourselves

The harmony others

The harmony with nature

In his course, Bright Future Now, Robert facilities quarterly cohorts who meet virtually for six weeks to start learning and practicing the 3 harmonies, gain tools for the journey and a better understanding of our cultural context within this transition time.

As a recent graduate of the course I can’t recommend it enough. Not a day goes by where I don’t incorporate the content in my thinking and doing.

Check out Context.org to learn more about Robert and the Context Institute’s community of cultural change agents.

Imagine if work was a contemplative practice...if work was a way to practice becoming more of yourself, to learn, to share, to collaborate, and to ultimately become more human. This is how Tom Thomison works. For well over a decade he has been on a quest to breakdown the employer/employee divide and create a new way of working that fosters all of these things by creating structures that revolve around purpose.

The current default hierarchical structure of organizing has reached its limits. Tom is introducing a complete replacement to hierarchy...a holarchy. Based on the principles of Holacracy, Tom is pioneering a new way of working, and in this conversation, Tom articulates how his most recent endeavor, Encode.org, is revolutionizing the way work gets done.

A seasoned entrepreneur and business builder with more than 30 years of experience, Tom is a recognized leader in self-organization practices and methods. In 2007, he co-founded HolacracyOne, LLC to further develop and mature Holacracy®, now a gold-standard replacement for conventional management hierarchies.

Tom is currently a Founding Member and Partner at encode.org, an organization focused on the creation of necessary legal, financial and social structures to further support self-organization and the new world of work.

Pat Wright is a global musical legend. Growing up in Carthage, Texas, she started singing at age three in her father's church. After making her way to Seattle, she lived further into her calling as a singer and choir director and started the Total Gospel Experience Choir. Overcoming many challenges, Pat and her choir traveled the globe singing to diverse audiences sharing the heart and soul of gospel music.

Pat Wright has sung, performed, and recorded with some of the world's most famous artists like Dave Matthews, Ray Charles, Michael Bolton, Pete Seeger, and Jimi Hendrix. She has sung for President Carter, President Clinton, and President Obama. She has been nicknamed "The Idol-breeder" because of the three Total Experience Gospel Choir members that have been participants on the hit TV show, American Idol. She is a frequent national anthem singer at many professional sporting events including the NBA, MLB, NFL, and MLS. The list goes on...

Her passion for singing runs deep, and her love for God and humanity runs even deeper. In this conversation you'll get to hear from an authentic and honest Pat Wright, who shares her struggles and triumphs with grace and humility, and with fire and grit. As a women she found herself immersed in a patriarchal Black Church community that limited her and the choir's potential to share their gift. This ultimately lead to a more expansive journey, one that took the choir to 28 countries and 38 states impacting countless lives the world-over.

There is something extremely unique and profound about Pat Wright's gift. She's not just a singer and a director. She is a conduit for love, justice and pace, and brings it all to and through her choir with the purpose of sharing it freely with the world. Pat's voice leading the Total Experience Gospel Choir is not something that can be explained or simply heard— it is something that must be experienced, and for me and many others, it has been truly transformative!

In this episode I share personal reflections about my understanding of the emerging future and what is required to flourish within the transition from and Empire Era to a Planetary Era.

Today was a difficult day, and out of it emerged a sign, an omen, and a wisdom that carried depth and meaning that I'd like to share. This episode is unique because it’s my first Emerging Future Podcast without more than two people. However, It was prompted by my wife’s nudging, and she is 100% right…all the time.

I hope you find some shared humanity in this story and can glean a better idea about me as a person as well as reflect about your own path. Please don’t hesitate to reach out or make comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

"We all have the capacity to have our fire kindled on behalf of the welfare of others and our own." -Sharon Daloz Parks

Sharon was in grade school when she first imbibed an image of a shared commons.  Her mother made a rule that everyone in her class would get a birthday invitation because it was the right thing to do.  Years later Sharon would find herself exploring similar values on a larger scale as a Professor at Harvard.  She looked at faith as meaning-making, something that all human beings do, not just what religious folks have.

This exploration lead to a collaboration with her now husband, Larry Daloz Parks and Cheryl and James Keen, to co-author the book Common Fire, an artfully crafted analysis of inspired lives that gets to the very primal dimensions of where our collective well-being is dependent...

The Commons.

Sharon describes the commons as, "a shared life within a manageable frame."  When referencing physical space, these are places where we all come together, either planned or unplanned, as ourselves, and are vital for a vibrant society.  The modern commons takes many shapes and forms.  It may look like Starbucks, a park, a baseball game, or a market.  Common Fire explains how integral these spaces are in creating a flourishing society because they create a sense of trust and a framework for understanding Other.  These outer landscapes are essential to developing the inner landscapes and capacities required for humanity to lead within complexity on behalf of the collective well-being of others. 

However, this elemental, place-making, soul-shaping fabric of human society is at a premium in the world today, and it is creating a deep hunger to recover and reimagine the new commons.

Although Common Fire was first published in 1996, it carries enormous relevance today as the velocity of change has accelerated leaving us with a gap in responsiveness, understanding and direction.  What Sharon articulates so elegantly truly gets to the core of what The Emerging Future Podcast is about: being present and courageous enough to lean into the complexity and unknown of the gap, and to wait expectantly for transformative moments that surprise us, and give us a deep sense of where we are and what's needed to move forward on behalf of Other and the future.

"Graphene is the most unusual and potentially the most valuable material on the planet." -Andrew Himes

Andrew Himes, author, internet pioneer, and imagineer is now the Director of Network Orchestration for The Carbon Trifecta, a new non-profit initiative that uses CO2 as the path to a global sustainable economy.  You heard that right, it uses CO2 (carbon dioxide), which is currently the primary human cause for global warming and ocean acidification, by sequestering it in the form of graphene which can be used to create nearly every product known to man...only better.

The Trifecta represents their 3-fold plan to:

1. Capture gigatons of CO2 before (and after) it enters the atmosphere.

2. Turn carbon-based businesses into allies, processing the CO2 into valuable graphene.

3. Accelerate market demand for graphene via 3D printing.

The Carbon Trifecta is working to partner with researchers, CO2 emitters like coal fire generating plants, and pioneering 3D printers to help everyone involved focus on the CO2 opportunity and gain an understanding of the possibility of this path to global sustainability.

The vision of the Trifecta can be realized by:

-Using carbon dioxide that would otherwise be contributing to global warming and ocean acidification, to:

-Address the increasing burden on the world's base materials caused by a transition to an advanced global economy,

-By enabling the remarkable capabilities of computer software and 3D printing to deliver profoundly efficient, beautiful and locallymade materials and products - and by introducing graphene into 3D printing as a path for converting this technology into a manufacturing platform capable of delivering complex materials despite a limited number of jets.

Having been discovered merely a decade ago, graphene is relatively new in our consciousness.  It is nothing short of a miracle material being both the strongest and most thermally conductive material known to man.  But it doesn't end there.  It is also extremely flexible, thin, lightweight and transparent.  It can be used to build nearly every physical thing we produce from clothes to buildings to computers, and can also filter salt water into fresh drinking water.  

If the Carbon Trifecta initiative works, life on planet earth will change drastically.  We will essentially be able to build everything we need, locally, with zero negative effect on the environment by using additive manufacturing.  In other words it will be the end of the era of extraction of all of our precious and limited natural resources and the end of human-caused CO2 emissions causing global warming.

In this conversation, Andrew not only talks about this innovative and valiant endeavor to save the planet, but he also offers his heart of compassion.  In fact, Andrew recently delivered the keynote address at the Eighth Worldwide Meeting on Human Values in Monterey, Mexico, where he unveiled what he calls his Grand Unified Theory of Compassion.

Andrew's Grand Unified Theory of Compassion says that awareness multiplied by compassionate action times the power of networks yields the result of a flourishing world.

"I wanted to describe compassion systematically — not just as a vague sentiment or a nice feeling — but as something measurable, replicable, structurally necessary." - Andrew Himes

This theory is what drives Andrew's work and lives at the heart of the Carbon Trifecta initiative.  Be sure to share this episode with your networks.  The one ask that Andrew had from us is that we help get the word out to enable the Carbon Trifecta to become a real global story that people are conscious of, excited about, and committed to exploring on behalf of humanity and planet earth.

"My customers are students. Not parents. Not the board."

— Raj Manhas

Raj Manhas was born in a dusty village in a displaced family in northern India. His grandmother taught him compassion at a very young, and that became Raj's through-line for approaching life. He worked hard in school and on the family farm and eventually made his way to the U.S. as an engineering student at the University of Washington.

From there, Raj's story took a series of random and unexpected transitions that lead him to the highest roles in public education as the Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools overseeing 8,000 employees.

He also served as Executive Director for Seeds of Compassion, a series of events over four days when His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other influential thinkers including well known brain and social scientists came together for an unprecedented five-day gathering in Seattle to engage the community in an in-depth conversation on compassion. 150,000 attended various events organized by Seeds of Compassion, and 44 million interacted with the Seeds of Compassion online broadcast.

Raj doubled down on compassion in his final role as Superintendent of North Thurston Public Schools. By forming a culture around the whole child, the district made significant headway on increasing student performance and decreasing disciplinary issues by focusing on the social and emotional skills in addition to academics. He also persuaded local voters to approve a 20-year $175 million bond measure to remodel five schools and build a new middle school.

Compassion became infectious and everyone from bus-drivers to teachers to students were swept up in the movement, which eventually expanded to the city's Chamber of Commerce. This created an opportunity for businesses to sign on as compassionate businesses.

Now retired, Raj has time to reflect on his journey and where he might exude compassion next.

Tarik Abdullah, aka Chef Tarik, found his purpose at a young age, "Feed the People. Teach the Kids." This lead Tarik to learn his craft everywhere from the restaurant kitchens of Seattle to the poorest neighborhoods in L.A. His love for food ran just as deep as his love for kids, and Tarik found a way to bring children into his own learning process, effectively passing on his knowledge of food and cooking to the next generation while he was learning.

Underneath Tarik's vocation as a chef is a deep passion, drive, and heart for creating authentic community. It's not surprising when you hear about his upbringing in Seattle's Central District where he experienced a rich, black cultural community, a deep Muslim faith tradition, and a diverse neighborhood that introduced him to foods from all over the globe and taught him the importance of saying "hello" to people on the street.

Following his passion lead Tarik into the limelight. He starred in ABC's The Taste, a reality TV show where chef's compete with each other while being mentored by a celebrity chef. Tarik was chosen by none other than Anthony Bourdain as his mentor. He went on to host another TV show from Vice, called Munchies, and also had a stint as Kanye West's personal chef.

But the limelight isn't at the heart of who Tarik is or why he does what he does. Tarik has a rare gift for seeing beyond color lines, ethnic borders, and gentrifying neighborhoods into a place of authentic community where anyone and everyone is welcomed and celebrated.

This vision for community is manifesting in The Black and Tan Hall, Tarik's latest venture. It's a performances venue, gathering space, restaurant, and lounge all wrapped up into one beautiful opportunity for anyone who's interested and inspired to participate as an owner. Tarik and his partners have designed the Black and Tan Hall as a co-op, a shared-ownership model among people who buy in and participate. The board approves ownership requests and offers a range of ways to buy in, sometimes even with no money at all. Regardless of cash, all owners are required to participate at some level to support the endeavor, whether it's serving drinks or fixing the toilet.

Just like Tarik himself, the vision is beautifully inclusive and inspiring.