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In S2E5 of The Human Layer, hosts Crystal and Taylor are joined by Mason Pashia who tells stories and runs media for Getting Smart, a learning innovation organization that covers the future of education with a commitment to the idea that the system can and must change.

We explore why storytelling shapes what education values and how learners can reclaim agency by curating the narratives of their lives. We trace how myths, scarcity thinking, and tech hype distort school and how attention, lineage, and grief work can guide more regenerative systems. 

• Mason’s path from songwriting to education media and learner advocacy 
• Storytelling as a way to translate lived experience into transferable skills 
• Curation as identity work and as an act of subtraction 
• Why “redesign school” feels strangely ungenerative for many people 
• Hollywood depictions that lock school into the same script 
• Abundance as a learning mindset when systems feel defined by scarcity 
• Gift economy reciprocity as a model for learning and teaching 
• Web3 sovereignty and regenerative community experiments for education 
• How crypto’s original decentralization story gets captured and warped 
• Grief, hospicing, and forgiveness as prerequisites for system change 
• Risks of wellness theater and spiritual bypass in leadership 
• AI as a servant of one user versus a tool for the many 
• Lineage and ancient texts as guardrails for pattern recognition tools 
• Attention and taste as core educational outcomes 
• Signs of hope in analog culture coming back 

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