Where can I listen to this podcast?

This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.

Does this podcast accept guests?

Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

Here Right Now

Claim This Podcast

by Will McInnes

11 episodes

Updated Daily

Accepts GuestsHas SponsorsLocation 🇬🇧

Podcast Overview

Here Right Now explores the future that’s already here. Every week a special guest brings a new perspective on how a facet of everyday life is changing right now. Through their expert eyes we go deep into emerging new trends around the world. <a href="https://hererightnow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">hererightnow.substack.com</a>

Language

🇺🇲

Publishing Since

6/17/2020

View on Apple Podcasts RSS Feed

1 verified contact email on file for Here Right Now

Pitch yourself as a guest, propose sponsorships, or reach out directly to the host.

See contact details

Recent Episodes

January 20, 2021

#11: Rewilding and the beaver with Derek Gow

Everyone needs to know about rewilding, in my opinion.Rewilding is an evocative concept. Notions of the good old days! A lush and lively community of species going about their business undeterred, swapping planes in the sky for a cornucopia of birds and bees, and on the ground, boar, bears, bison, wolves and maybe beaver too. Not just a return, but perhaps a new accommodation - humans and the rest of the ecosystem in balance. Rewilding. It sounds cool.Pandemic and lockdowns created space and caught imaginations. In the absence of other distractions, we town and city-dwellers started noticing the birds in our gardens, while in Barcelona the <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/alfonslopeztena/status/1240772156339949575?s=20">city’s boar population is out of control</a> and in <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-52103967">Wales mountain goats invaded a town</a>. And lots of us have heard about the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife">rare species that have returned to Chernobyl</a> of all places, and how the reintroduction of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/wolves-yellowstone/">wolves to Yellowstone Park</a> unlocked an amazing cascade of ecosystem improvements. ‘Nature is healing’ was the optimistic meme.<a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/gow_derek">Derek Gow</a> has spent a lifetime caring for, cultivating and reintroducing species in the UK. A farmer and a conservationist, and now author of the funny, irreverent and moving book <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08HX1T8B3/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">‘Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man's Quest to Rewild Britain's Waterways’</a>, he tells it how he sees it.Gow knows what rewilding takes. He’s spent decades doing it. Fighting red tape and the affluent countryside lobbies. Breeding and introducing delicate creatures through trial and error. As an authority and a practitioner, Derek can share an accurate and grounded point of view about how real rewilding is or isn’t, how pressing the need is and what the major barriers are to making better, faster progress, today.In this conversation you’ll learn about keystone species, about why the beaver is so surprisingly impactful on its ecosystem, you’ll hear about the white-tailed eagles ‘the size of a flying barn door’ being reintroduced across the UK, you’ll get a clear sense of how you can support rewilding efforts and loads more. And you’ll enjoy Derek’s fluent, fiery, no-nonsense account.Links* <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/gow_derek">Derek Gow</a> - Twitter* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08HX1T8B3/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man's Quest to Rewild Britain's Waterways</a> by Derek Gow (book on Amazon)* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.devonwildlifetrust.org/sites/default/files/2018-01/Beaver%20Project%20update%20%28LowRes%29%20.pdf">Beavers on the River Tamar, Devon</a> (opens PDF)* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.roydennis.org/animals/raptors/sea-eagle/">White-tailed Eagle reintroduction</a> - Roy Dennis Foundation* <a target="_blank" href="https://knepp.co.uk/home">Knepp</a> - ground-breaking rewilding project in Sussex, UK* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/wilding/isabella-tree/9781509805105">Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm</a> by Isabella Tree (book on Waterstones)* Further listening <a target="_blank" href="https://hererightnow.substack.com/p/8-understanding-plants-and-funghi">#8: Understanding our plants and fungi with Dr Ilia Leitch</a>Credits* Music by <a target="_blank" href="https://leerosevere.bandcamp.com/">Lee Rosevere</a>Automated transcriptWill McInnes 0:00 So did you did you get an eagle today?Derek Gow 0:04 I've not been anywhere near the farm today I've been up looking at another project and Bridgewater nowhere near that goodness knows hopefully but I won't see till tomorrowWill McInnes 0:15 right Where's Bridgewater in the world?Derek Gow 0:18 Somerset so when I'm looking at we rewire a rewilding project on a farm there lots of people really interested in smaller areas of land taking smaller areas of land 120 acres or something like that and looking at how you restore it for nature so was up seeing charming couple who run our you know, organic fruit and vege operation there and already have an area which is incredibly rich and wildlife Big Finish flocks, like so which I haven't seen for years, I say the game leading areas, and then it's just down to the, the crops and the seeds and the untidiness of it all. And because you've got that you've got nature, it's not very complicated.Will McInnes 1:04 I love it. I love it. That's so so fantastic. I'd love to just start by introducing you and saying, you know, welcome,Unknown Speaker 1:14 you're,Will McInnes 1:15 I've been really inspired following you have read your book recently. And on the book sleeve, it describes you as a farmer and a conservationist is that is that the feel like the right kind of label for you?Derek Gow 1:27 And yeah, I don't see any contradiction between the two things. To be quite honest, this idea there in amicable is just nonsense. At the end of the day, if you farm wisely with our main to other life, you can do much. So I see no contradiction in that.Will McInnes 1:43 Just to get us going, you know, my experiences. I'm a lay person I'm I have had a kind of nerdy, but amateurish fascination with birds of prey. My recent story, which would be, you know, the pandemic, being stuck at home, becoming obsessed with the bird feeder in the garden, and you see these kind of memes of nature is healing. And someone ended up recommending a nap to me, and I live in Brighton. I'm speaking to you now from Brighton, that you're down in the West Country in Devon.Unknown Speaker 2:17 That's right. Yeah.Will McInnes 2:18 I've got myself over to nap. And we did the data with my two boys who are just early teens and hearing about every species of bat and Owl and rare species of visiting birds and solitary bees. And from there, I found my way to you and your exploits on Twitter and, and your book. And, you know, I would love to hear a short kind of potted history of your story. How did you get to be doing this work?Derek Gow 2:43 When I was very small, I became involved with the rare breed survival trust, I always had some pet sheep at home, where I live in a town in the Scottish Borders, called beggar. And when I think I was about maybe 10. Somebody gave me a Shetland sheep as a pet. No, at that time, these old breeds of livestock were very rare. I mean, they were very uncommonly kept. And you drive through landscapes and just not see any flocks of colour cheap, or Longhorn cattle or anything like it. And so when I was given this, I think also they gave me a book for my birthday about, you know, these old but it was written by a chap called john Vince, about the old breeds of domestic livestock, their history, that confinement to the Western Isles, or, you know, in the case of white Park capital, the containment and the last of the hunting parks. And when you start to read the stories of these remarkable creatures, you know, you're basically on VR unravelling a tapestry of British history. And I became very interested in that and then I, I graduated, you know, from that to, you know, reading Gerald Donald's books and his expeditions and South America and all the colourful characters he met and entailed, and his say, in a search for, for animals to bring back for zoos. And then later in his life, obviously he, he turned to the idea that zoos could be so much more than they should be ARKS, saving creatures for a better future, and then restoring them when when the world was a better place. So I mean, that's really what inspired me at the beginning. It was nothing complicated. It wasn't a university education, or anything like it. I left school when I was 17, to work in agriculture for five years. And when I was made redundant at the end of that, then, I was offered the opportunity to, to manage a collection of rare breed domestic livestock in a place called palace, Rick Country Park on the outskirts of Glasgow. I did that for a number of years. As I was doing it, they asked me if I wanted to manage the zoo. And I did that so I came to work with a very broad range of British and European wildlife species in captivity. And was asked to understand how you read them how you maintain them effectively. And from that point, I guess, somewhere in the region of 30 years ago, the idea that some of these could be reintroduced a time when the world was better, which we don't seem to have quite achieved yet. Was was was was born and I became involved with waterfalls and beavers and I'm now working on wild cats and other species with a view to reintroducing them back into parts of the law strange.Will McInnes 5:33 So, so cool, and I know that people listening will already be really dialled in to what you're saying. Like just the fact that you're now helping to introduce and work with wild cats is just incredibly exciting. So according to the list that I've put together, you've bred wild cats, white storks, European field hamsters, harvest mice, night, herons, stoats, water shrews. polecats.Derek Gow 6:02 Yeah, I mean, it's many.Will McInnes 6:05 Okay, goes that's not that's not even the half of it.Derek Gow 6:09 No, nowhere nearUnknown Speaker 6:10 love it.Will McInnes 6:11 So what we're going to come on to beavers and we're going to come on to sort of a broader view, but how would you characterise the state of British wildlife today? Like, you're you're, you're in Britain, I'm in Britain. Not all of the listeners will be but but what, you know, what's it like out there?Derek Gow 6:34 It's truly terrible. I mean, you're looking at a landscape where life is no longer just leaching from it. Life has left. Yes, the sheep and cattle Yes, the fields are green. But in many parts of the British Isles, when you examine what's under the greenness, then you find soils that are dead, full of pesticides. You know, with no worms, no mycorrhizal fungus, no soil, invertebrates, you know, just look near lifeless in art. The big animals have all gone, we extinguish them a long time ago in the past, we kept a few of them, the ones we wanted to hunt we cultivated and, and ensured they were there. So the Red Deer and, and the foxes you know, they remained because at the end of the day, not because the O wetted us but because, you know, people will instruct you that these animals were the creatures that another kind of person wanted to chase up and down the landscape on horseback. And if they removed them, then there would be repercussions. So, you know, what we've got is is the most bizarre and distorted Guild of creatures imaginable. We have species living free here from all over the globe, you go into the London parks and you're besieged by paddock eats, you wander through, you know, woodlands and in the Midlands and one of the commonest you, you'll see, you will encounter Asiatic muntjac and yet the The Guild of creatures that should be here have been much diminished by us. And as I say, when you come to modern times, you know, what you find is with an intensification of farming, and, you know, coupled with, you know, a very different view of what forestry should be, you know, plantation forestry, you know, solid blocks of alien conifers that we've done really pretty much everything we could do to eradicate life from the land. No, some of that, for sure was unintentional, but the near end result has been that by the time you look at a landscape, my my farm and then on the Devon Cornwall border overviewing Dharma, that the wading birds that redshanks, the lapwings, the curlews have all gone, you know, in the last generation, and the generation before that the hen Harriers, the black grows, the wheatears nesting on our farm to they've all gone to. I know, we're left with olanski, whether a few Meadow pipits and a few small family groups of other birds, but other than that, there's really nothing much left. Left Alive. It's It's It's really a pretty deplorable situationWill McInnes 9:13 that's utterly despairing. That is awful. And what also occurs to me and this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but is that even though I'm enthusiastic about nature and the wildlife, that a lot of those birds species that you've mentioned, I wouldn't recognise them I wouldn't know. I wouldn't be able to pick out a Curlew or, or a black grouse or a hen Harrier from a from a Castro and so it strikes me reading your book, reading Isabella's trees book reading around the subject, I'm starting to realise that our vocabulary in kind of mainstream society has become very reduced. It's it's we don't recommend Is the tree species and we don't recognise that the kind of Fauna and Flora around us to the extent that I feel I personally absolutely should, what I'd love to understand is in in your book bringing back the Beaver, which is fantastic, and I hope doing very well because it's really funny and mixes, you know the seriousness of the situation and the scale of the opportunity with with many a hilarious tale. One thing I'd love for people listening to understand is can you tell us what a keystone species is? Like, what what is it that about these particular species that leads to such great outcomes downstream?Derek Gow 10:42 Well, all species are important and all species have impact. So at the end of it all, there is no species that's developed as part of a guild of life, which is fair to say is an essential you remove one. And there are always implications for for the others, and the landscapes and the environments that surround them. But a keystone species is it's it's very simpler. The you know, the the terminology comes from the idea that you have this board are shovels, stone, supporting a bridge, and the key stone is a stone that links the two sides without which the whole structure can stand. And if you pull it out, it just goes boom, into the river. And that's the end of that you have no bridge and you have to swim with your sacks of carrots on your head from market and one side to your cabinet field. The other. So that's a keystone species. And it's a term we use to lightly I mean, I've had in the time that I've been involved in this a certain conferences where people tell me that crayfish are a keystone species or have perhaps even said that waterfalls are a keystone species, species and, you know, really, they're not. And beavers are not a keystone species, the North Americans who know them much better than we do, will tell you that they're not a keystone species because they're actually much more important than that, that a force of nature that a natural force, in their own right, and this natural force, by by holding water, in vast quantities and valley landscapes by breaking forests by creating great complexities of dams and impoundments. By engineering landscapes to suit itself has a huge impact on natural function and and on on the on the Guild of other species that surround it. So there's ample evidence now for the world range that you know, Beaver Dam complex is slow the flow of water for example, during flood events, you know, we look at our rivers and streams gushing rapidly from the, you know, the treeless sheep shore and uplands down into the valley bottoms developing into raging torrents that then race through the landscapes again, that are denuded of anything that would naturally inhibit their progress because of course, we've so extensively drained and failed, you know, bypass the site channels that we think are relevant river or stream as being something that runs in a single water course along the the the bottom of a valley to a thing called a river, which then runs in a single water course with other canalys water waterways, even though we call them rivers, which are just largely drains, you know, all for flowing like arterial functions into this main water body. But, of course, it was never that way before. I mean, what we've essentially done if you want an analogy is we've taken, you know, a body that you can see through and we've stripped out all the capabilities, and we've left some of the veins and we straighten some that are not quite in the right position as far as our function is concerned. And we've left some of the RFPs, but not all of them. And that's how we've engineered water so that when, when the rains come, the rain hits the compacted clay ground or the bare ground, there are no trees to absorb it anymore races across the land and to the water courses and boom, you have flooding and misery. And the other side of that, that. The other flip side of that is that as as the climate warms and becomes more and more unstable, is that we end up with water that we simply can't retain in the landscape because it's so effectively drained, that as soon as it falls, it leaves and you end up with drought and beavers basically, act two to regulate both of those functions. The wetlands, which are large means so for example, in my farm, you know, we have a system of old Victorian drains that run through the bottom of the farm. And these things are maybe seven, eight foot deep. They're eroded down to bedrock. No. And when you know when it rains, they're raging torrents. When it doesn't rain, there's no water in them. So there are no fish. There are no dragonflies. There are no there are no there are no muscles that are no and Kingfisher speeding. There are no otters there are no frogs there's there's nothing that relies on water. And what the beavers have done is the beavers have basically blocked them again and again and again and again inmultiple different ways to the points where, you know, the maybe punched holes in the ditch sides and other streams that were never there before are flowing. They've impounded those as well and other streams flow as a result of that. So whenever the animal none of that water would be there. And without water, none of that life would be there. through the summer months, the deer wouldn't drink the boar wouldn't wallow. beavers, as I said, Our keystone species, they're an incredibly important function of nature. And that's why it's critical that we restore them.Will McInnes 15:51 I absolutely love that. And there's a snippet that I'll read from your book, if I may, which is really just caught me. Which is, she was fragrant of wooden Herbes of the indescribable sweet smell of beavers that once recognised, you can sometimes catch in a willow wood on a warm day in landscapes where you know, frustratingly they are not, but should be. And it's just beautiful and really captured for me the relationship that you have with the species. So where are we with beavers in the UK right now.Derek Gow 16:32 We are in a place where we have made a beginning. And having made a beginning are We are in a situation where there is clear political support for the restoration of the species. There is a rising widespread understanding of just how important they are the the old arguments about fish impediment and agricultural damage, fading away fast. But we're not doing this well. We are a very hesitant people. were good at standing on a world stage and blogging about our own Wharf kind of like you know, Toad of Toad Hall type characters full of hot air, and our own importance and when it actually comes to not very good at doing very much at all. I've sat in an auditorium in Europe where small shrill British scientists have told people from from Norway and Sweden and Belgium and Germany, and France, whoa, when eventually we got round to reintroducing the beaver in Britain, our models suggested it would be the best introduction ever. And you know, it says an awful lot for people like that. And they have the human grease to actually listen to these fools. And at least some of them clap them at the clapped at the end, I don't think I would have done so at the end of all, we're just braggarts. So we're in a place now where recommendations are being made to government with regard to what shouldn't shouldn't be done with beavers in England and Scotland. There's a massive fight because the Scottish Minister for farming has said there can be no extension of the range of the species that's not through natural dispersal in Scotland to pleases chums in the Scottish Farmers Union. And therefore they're they're issuing licences to kill animals that could be used elsewhere. And Wales. You know, they're basically the Welsh executive of of them all have behaved terribly badly. they've they've, they've marked organisations that the Wildlife Trust grown for years, they've, you know, tried to come up with with reason after reason why there should be no beavers and whales, and there should be no movement to restore nature there that's meaningful. And, and it's frankly, the people involved in this are beamed in a way that's truly shameful. I mean, the next couple of days, I hope to see some of the some of the background correspondence with regard to this that explains, you know, the course of thinking but I think it's fair to say that there in the mean, the people who are there to try and hold the status quo, have not behaved well with regard to the restoration of this creature. And I'm not behave well with regard to the restaurant, restaurant relation of nature that would follow us return. And you know, frankly, I think that's really disappointing because they're not there to make decisions about whether something's right of their own of their own volition. They're there to do what people want and if their boss is at the top of telling them to do something, and people don't below are expecting them to do something. And if they realise at all, this is a time of, you know, massive climate change in global extinction, then they should be acting to facilitate projects, their restore species like the beaver and not simply getting in the way.Will McInnes 19:57 They definitely, definitely should and at the end of this, I'll be asking you what we can do to help throw our weight behind this. If I'm ambling around the right piece of countryside in the UK, is it possible I can find beavers living wild?Derek Gow 20:13 Sure, you can go to the river otter and the visible river otter, if you go to the T that are that are places where you can see them as an estate at a place called bump, you know where you can walk through and see all the dams that are you know, on the catron Trail off to one side of the footpath you can go and watch them in in knapdale and can tire and unknown places like that over stowed and can't there is a free living population of beavers and indeed on the river Tamar in Devon There are also beavers you can kayak kayak up the river from places like CT Hill and perhaps see them in the in the dusk have a warm summer night or in the morning miss when the when the heat starts to draw the water off forever. So yes, there are an increasing number of places you can go to see beavers, though they are still a real animal in the British Isles, I mean a national population of maybe only about one and a half 2000 animals.Will McInnes 21:13 So we've got these shrill, shrill braggarts proclaiming confidently that we're doing the right thing in the kind of regulatory layer. And then we've got a small growing but very rare still population of animals living successfully and wildly in the UK.Derek Gow 21:34 Yes, we have, right.Will McInnes 21:36 And then, you know, governments and regulatory bodies, if I get anything from your book, it's that they seem depressingly inept and actively against these initiatives. What I would love to do is we've we've covered that. The angle also that interests me is that, you know, land is under the control of landowners. Clearly, farmers play a crucial role in this their attitudes, their beliefs, what they're trying to achieve the incentives in the systems that they are operating within you in the people at Napa have from farming. And yet it seems the farming community is very often opposed to rewilding efforts. what's what's what's your take on that?Derek Gow 22:19 Well, I think that's the way that paradigm is often pitch, but it's not as straightforward as that. I mean, yesterday, I went see someone my next door neighbor's and we're standing in the yard, and we're having a chat about one or two different things. And and the way for the lady who had asked me to come for a chair, says Ray Dalio, how could we possibly get beavers on our land in the valley bottom, and you look at her and she's on the Tamar and you know, they're common, they're common, the day will not be far away, when they find their wetland and the valley bottoms and they start to reshape it in the way they did. You know, when they were last there, you know, maybe 800 1000 years ago. So there are people who are immensely sympathetic. There are many people who understand that the changes of the 70s the 80s, the 90s were very wrong and that the damage the pesticides did the land improvement the crop changes the chemicals that enabled us to, you know, just grow without dung anymore to to just worm sheep without considering the numbers we were keeping all the things that seemed like a brave new world are no increasingly being seen for what the where, which is an unsustainable charade there are farmers who care very deeply I mean, today I was in an organic fruit and vege farm you wander around, and as I said, I mean there are flocks of chaffinches there, hundreds of them, big flocks of Linares, hundreds of them, the lady was telling me she seen bramblings just you know the glass last winter flocks of bramblings and they're they're flying into the the you know, this these are regular rows of corn or kale, the the the owners lay everything seed they have lots of rough areas around the edge. So when dogs grow in their vegetables that the dogs are eating No, but the doc beetles and and when you look at inches, well it's a bit untidy in that untidiness, you have real life you have the predators or some of the crop pests, you have the predators of some of the weed species, it's really an amazing thing to see. So farmers are a very mixed bunch. There are people who care from our personal point of view, and from because they just feel the way we've come to is not right. And there are also people who frankly are looking at the economic situation, as it's changing from from this old system of you know, State subsidy big amounts of taxpayers money just being given to other individuals and society for doing you know, actually, nothing much. I mean, it's just been so wrong for so long, that there are a class of people who are, who are poor, who have to feed their children go to the food banks, and yet there are other people in society, who are given hundreds of 1000s of pounds of everybody else's money, simply because they own land. And and, and really just act on their own selfish interests after that. So it's changing is changing really fast. The new system of government payments, you know, as enshrined in the 25 year environment plan, the end and environmental land management series of payments that are due to come in, you know, are targeted at rewarding people who basically create land and live user land sympathetically, and create living space for nature. And increasingly, the heartening bit about what I do as a day job known is that you meet really very many of them, you know, people who are tunnelling ready to say, you know, you're gonna have to trust us, because we are the solution. And we can actually do things that you know, no system of state organisation is going to deliver, you know, we can change, we want to change, and there are very many people like that,Will McInnes 26:22 oh, that's fantastic to hear really, really positive and really promising. So thank you. And I love your point about the untidiness of that organic fruit farm. And that was one of the things that I've taken from, from exploring this topic of rewilding through your book and through others, which is that the landscape isn't supposed to look manicured. I mean, that's obvious, but but that in the foreign tree that doesn't get moved in the carcass that doesn't get taken away in the, in the mixture of what happens. That's where the kind of richness of the species really start to prosper. So it's great to hear that. What I'd love to know is, it's where do you think we can get to, like, where you're a pragmatist? You're a realist, you're a sleeves rolled up person who gets this stuff done. Where can we get to,Derek Gow 27:15 we can sort this out, we are a clever species. You know, we was talking to a film producer in Los Angeles the other day, and they are they're working on, you know, on a film production, which looks at the problems that this planet has, and it looks at the solutions that are behind, which are so incredible, and asked the question, why don't we do it? And this is the biggest problem is it's not that we can't change it's not that we can look at the ruined landscape that we made and say, Well, look, we made it, we made it this way we can reshape it, we can look at you know, a sustainable agriculture, we can look at returning organic farming, you know, with dung, going back into the span of broken old arable fields that are, are no reduced to nothing much older, and Dustin, have plenty examples, you know, of farmers worldwide who've done just exactly that we can regenerate land that basically has just been been beaten to near death by us we can, we can reform wetlands, we can learn to read tolerate an animal like the Beaver, which is not our enemy. It's so greatest friends, we can restore lost species like the pine Marten and the wild cat, which we're just fleed from the landscape. Bye, bye bye bye. mediaeval hunters for far or to protect rabbits are the gatekeepers, because they believed quite firmly that they were there to ensure that none of their masters, you know, targets were eaten by any other creature, we can do this there are some people out there, you know, small cadres of folk who have mains that are still based in medievalism, whose whose thoughts and actions are dark, but you know, as a percentage of society, they're fading away, no, and that's a good thing. It's high time, these backward views of what the landscape should be, you know, just weather then died. And we could also, you know, in the end, look forward to, you know, perhaps the restoration of animals like the wolf, at the end of the day, when you look at the history of interaction, you know, we had with that animal it was all to do with, you know, more or less in a Western European sense. This, this, this idea of Christian author of, of taking a landscape taking an environment and returning it to the ordered hand of God so that when travellers, you know, coming through a wilderness, cross the valley ridge and look down on a landscape that was shaped by the cistercians. You know, there were the You know the eggs and the walled garden there were the fattened pigs you know the the milking cows everything was ordered by God and what an impression it created so when you look at the landscape the garden landscape we have no the huge extent you see that in absurd mimic, you know the landscape of this island was never meant to be one gigantic, gigantic garden with, you know mourn and graced fields flailed straight hedges. No wetlands, no rocks left in the pasture. No fallen trees is just nonsense. What we need is more untidiness, not only a physical but a mental untidiness, that starts to look at things that conflict with us and doesn't always when they do reach for a bottle of poison or a gun or a trap. That's that's not not the way that we're going to. to re bond with nature. We need to look at forging a different future,Will McInnes 31:01 just utterly compelling, utterly compelling and, and so brilliantly put. I see from your Twitter that you're currently feeding some some eagles. I think it would surprise a lot of people to know that that some of these species of birds are out there and on the return I've actually got a tattoo of a Rob kite on my arm because for me, I was always interested in birds of prey and the first time I saw a red kite, which was I don't know not that long ago, less than 10 years ago, it was an amazing sight because it was a bigger than normal bird. But you're you're trying to feed something even bigger Can you just let us know what what's going on?Derek Gow 31:46 Well whitetail eagle is a bird that you know the bird books will tell you is the size of a flying barn door so I mean you're looking at the you know a bird that is near and tight to a vulture than an eagleand the air in the ER any Are those the gills called Eagle with a sun in it sigh was a common bird right the way through the British Isles and and it survived in the southwest until very recently, if you look at maps of Dart moved from the 1840s they'll show you where we're where the bustards were where the Eagles were where the spoon bells were, where the Queens were where the pine Martens wherever the stone Martin's wherever the polecats were, you know our landscape that's just no saw ascetically deprived of life that if you see a stone chat which is a bird the size of our most you're doing awfully well. The last of the refusals are just about done this West sub dying it's just hangar we come to this and and you'll look at it now and say well, what is rock bottom going to look like? By the time the insects have gone and they're collapsing by 50 75% I much worse gonna actually get so we have a big task at our hands and and restoring birds. Like the white tailed eagle is very much part of it. The only reason why we killed them in the past was down to the the deepest of ignorance. Yes, some people told stories of them, you know, cutting away children surely pillaged? You know, dead livestock. But at the end of all, it wasn't a meat. Well, it was, you know, in fairness, if you look back to Elizabeth and times, he looked at the percentage of crops, both domestic livestock and green, it was taken by other species, you can argue that when you were peasant farming, that this was a significant a significant thing to have happen. We are not peasant farming anymore, a third of the food we produce in Britain is just wasted. And then when we it's wasted before it gets to a play, and then when we actually get it to a plate, we waste even more. So we're farming land that could never really grow anything. And it has only been hailed in Thrall because of the public subsidies that have enabled the people, people farming the fairly poorly bred sheep and remote areas, you know, to do so. So it's time for change in those eagles are part of it, because when the farm subsidies finish, you're going to have to look at what you're going to do with all this land in a different way. And and the argument that we can't have rewilding we can't have nature is because you've got a collapsing industrial lobby. That's there to serve its own interests, its members, the interests of the pesticide companies and the suppliers of of fertiliser and and and and and and and warmers for sheep and cattle. That's why they're making a big fuss about it is because they No no. If you lose the ear of government and they lose the poll at the certainty of money, other people's money has given them then they will feed and Never be as important as they have been to date. And that, frankly, is a good thing. At the end of all, if we're looking at changing this landscape, I very often hear when we sit down and talk about beavers and people whining about the ones that are illegally in inverted commas released on the tear, but how much damage is done? Oh, we should have asked people first and, you know, this is just wrong and people should have been consulted. And in the end, you've got to look at this waning and see what what for what it is, it's the face a mask elite, whereby, you know, the people that are claiming that they're the virtuous in a certain sense really are not, you know, they're really good at pulling levers behind the scenes persuading politicians and, and those that make decisions that their, their their voice is more important than anybody else's. And I but what they do see is that you know, we should have more discussion and we should be open and what we do, I think that's a good thing. I think we should be open and what we do, I think we should start asking people whose money we're taking what should happen to you know, do they want to pay that money to poison half of Lincolnshire to the point where the waters leaving the land are so toxic that fish can't even live in them anymore? Or do they want to use that money to create farmland where animals live decent lives, not as many of them where they are, you know, kept as part of family units whether a wildflowers growing in the corner whether harvest mice and and and and the untrimmed hay jgs, whether it's white tailed eagles, soaring overhead and weather are beavers where you've actually got other creatures that you could cherish existing and that landscape around you. Let's ask people what they want to do. The Sharad is that we never have. So I think that there has to be a different way of doing this and, and asking people what they want is a very big part of it.Will McInnes 36:50 That's a really exciting prospect. And I love this momentum that you're building for, you know, calling on the people to express express what they want, especially given that we are paying for so much of this. And the prospect of barn door sized Eagles soaring in the air is very, very appealing to me. So as we as we bring this fantastic conversation to a close Derrick, my question is, what can we do? What can I do as everyday people to support a richer wild or ecology? What What do you implore from us or instruct us or, you know, point point somewhere,Derek Gow 37:30 when an issue comes along, make a fuss, you don't just understand your issues? Well, don't just accept what's in a simple newspaper article, try to sit if you really care, try to sit down, to read to understand there's so much information out there. And when something comes along, and it's going wrong, you rate your politicians, and you object, if you feel like it support some of the smaller organisations, there's some brilliant organisations out there, like the Roy Dennis foundation for, for for nature, conservation is run by, you know, a man who's just near and credible, who spent the 80 odd years of his existence on this planet reintroducing some of the big lost birds like the white tailed Eagle, or the or the Osprey, you know, just and who's who's talked for a very long time about what we need to do, and it manages to do what he does with very little money. don't support the big guys, the big guys or, or find a way through, if you give some of your money, which is always limited to people that they will act well. There are other people out there who are asking for money, who are charlatans, again, research those people and make sure you don't spend money unwisely, on doing on trying to do something, it's never going to come to anything in the end. So there are things you can do lobbying politicians being one but in the end, if you own any kind of amount of land to be a small farm or a garden or an acre, whatever it is, think again about what you're doing with it. If you're a small holder, start to move your farming away from the edge, talk to your neighbours. See, if there's some way you can create corridors through landscapes. So the harvest mice or glow worms, which need rough gas pawsox, you know, can actually find living space and an environment that's fundamentally turned against them. Let your hedges grow along, you know, create more ponds and pools. Don't worry about piles, a lot of rocks lying around or big piles of logs, rotting in a corner, just let them be understand what nature needs and you start to do what you can. Because at the end of the day, the more of you that do that, then the more space will work but there will be for other life too.Will McInnes 39:41 Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, I would love to say a massive thank you to you direct for the work that you do for the book that you've written for joining us on the podcast and in terms of people being able to to follow you you're at Gao underscore Derek. So that's g o w underscore Derek on Twitter. The book is bringing back the Beaver. Just thank you so much, Derek. I really, really appreciate what you've done is awesome.Derek Gow 40:07 That's very kind glad we persevered.Will McInnes 40:10 Yeah, me too. Thank you and keep up the great work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://hererightnow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">hererightnow.substack.com</a>

December 10, 2020

#10: Creating new operating models for cities with Jenni Lloyd

Cities are ‘serendipity engines’ and ‘social super colliders’ as well as vital places that we live, according to our expert guest <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennilloyd/">Jenni Lloyd</a> - but are the operating models used to deliver our city services and governance fit for a world of continued social change and austerity in public spending? Instead, how can we build better communities and places?"Austerity has dictated that there's scarcity, but actually there's almost an infinite abundance within communities, and the local authorities that have realized that have taken a very different approach"In her work recently at the innovation foundation <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nesta.org.uk/">NESTA</a>, thinker, advisor and strategist Jenni and her team published the six part <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/introducing-new-operating-models-local-government/">New Operating Models for Local Government</a>. Behind the scenes they spoke with frontline innovators finding new interesting ways to deliver public services in cities, many in communities the North of England, who have been collaborating to develop new responses based on fundamental questions like “What is the contract between the city and the citizen?” and “What is a good place, what is a good life?”, linking together ‘anchor institutions’ like local hospitals, police and other social services in helpful new ways. By the end of this conversation you’ll be looking at your own cities as serendipity engines, as networks, as a holistic system and above all as places changing, right now.Links* <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/jennilloyd">Jenni Lloyd - Twitter</a>* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/introducing-new-operating-models-local-government/">New Operating Models for Local Government - NESTA</a>* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nesta.org.uk/data-visualisation-and-interactive/sharetown/">ShareTown - NESTA</a> interactive visual map with real examples of city innovation* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwbJieCRe9o&feature=youtu.be">Asset-based Community Development (ABCD)</a> - short videoCredits* Music by <a target="_blank" href="https://leerosevere.bandcamp.com/">Lee Rosevere</a>Automated transcriptSo Jenni, you have a great history. And it would be brilliant, if you could just share, not the hour, the hour long version, but the which you warned it could take which, but if you could give us a brief potted history of Jenni Lloyd maybe starting from the beginning,Jenni Lloyd 2:26 at the very beginning, 1968, I did a fine art degree. And I went to art college, and primarily to leave home and spent three years making things and with varying degrees of success. And then I left art college with a degree in fine art, which isn't a particularly saleable commodity. And I found my way to Brighton kind of randomly, because I wanted to not go home to where my parents live, because it's very boring. And I didn't want to stay where it was, because it's boring. So I came to Brighton, and I'm still in Brighton. So Brighton is important to me. But um, I think my first job out of college was cleaning toilets on the pier. And, and so I had no idea what I wanted to do, I had no idea what was available to me. And looking back at it. And I had had some stupid ideas like this whole thing about truth to materials and how I wouldn't use computers. And bearing in mind, obviously, that this is almost kind of before the internet. But, um, that kind of fell by the wayside when I got involved in. Again, just kind of serendipitously, like, randomly, I started using computers, because I was working for the local newspaper to process images. And I realised that a lot of the kind of artwork that I was still making, which is all kind of collage II, based that I could actually do in Photoshop. And, and that led me into years worth of kind of digital design and production. And, and I think I've always thought that my works followed the, the, what's the word, evolution of the web? So initially, just about interfaces. So how do people use things? And how can I make them do the thing that we want them to do online? And then kind of it got more social? And that that was really interesting, because then we started thinking about well, how to how do these things that we're using digitally, and map into what we do collectively anyway, so how to communities work, and how can we provide online spaces where people can behave as communities, and what does that mean for businesses? So you were there for that? And so it meant a lot for businesses. And I think I look back on in those early days of naivety about what we thought the social web might engender, with obviously no knowledge of where we would end up in terms of, you know, kind of Cambridge analytic or, and all those sorts of things. But we did have a notion that digital stuff would be massively impactful in terms of society and politics and relationships between individuals and businesses, and all that sort of thing. And when obviously, we were thinking that it would have a largely positive effect, and had no insight into what the kind of negative effects would be. Anyway, so I spent years as a kind of digital designer, producer, then user experience designer, and then eventually as a kind of consultant for organisations that were trying to make themselves more fit for a digital world. And so it's funny because digital transformation now has, you know, like a legacy in history. But at the time, those were new terms, I think social media was new term, when we were first working in it, there was debate over whether that was actually the right term, and it seems extraordinary now. But anyway, so things like the cluetrain manifesto were really important. And the way that we were trying to run ourselves democratically was really important and aligned to the way that we thought the web was going to make the world. And it felt like an opportunity to change the world. But and, but to do it through business, and, and the web. And so that was obviously enormously exciting. And not necessarily Well, you know, successful in terms of kind of growing a big business or whatever. But it certainly led me down really interesting routes, in terms of human behaviour, and the intersection between how we work together, collectively, but also how the internet kind of affects that. And soover a period of time, I decided to shift from thinking about business and innovation, and all those kind of fairly logical, hard terms and thinking about how does, how do you use those tools to change society. And sounds quite grand and aspirational, I have say, none of this was a plan, it will just emerged. And the more I've kind of come to think about what I do and how I do it, the more interested I become an emergence. And the less I believe in plans, that won't be a surprise to you, but I don't really believe that plans are real. They're just an aspiration. So emergence actually kind of makes sense to me. So over time, I started thinking about how do we live? And where do we live? And how can you change how we live and where we live, to create better outcomes. And, and I became interested in the concept of eudaimonia, which is a Greek word, which I find difficult to spell. And but it means a sort of state of human flourishing. And as soon as I kind of read about that concept, I just thought, yeah, that's what I'm interested in, is, how does all this stuff that we do together in the world? How does it create a state of flourishing? And the more I think about it, the more obvious it's aligned to, to to ecology as well. And because humans can't flourish, if they totally f**k up the place that they live in, so, so yeah, a state of human flourishing is actually a state of kind of planetary flourishing as well.Will McInnes 8:37 That's a lovely, it's a lovely intro and a lovely set up. And so more recently, this concept of eudaimonia, is that how you say,Jenni Lloyd 8:48 I don't know, I say it the way I read it,Will McInnes 8:50 eudaimonia, it starts with the letters, E, you if you're if you're typing it in right now. So that really resonated for you. And that's about a kind of holistic sense of flourishing. And then I know that you have a particular interest in how this happens around place, or around cities. So to just just tell it, take that little thread and run with it go there.Jenni Lloyd 9:17 So we all live in places, and I live in a place. And I'm really interested in this place in Brighton. And it's partly obviously because I live here, and so I know it well. And, and also I've interacted with lots of different parts of it. And like kind of physically, but also the people who live in it, the different communities that live in it, and I can't care about it, so and so if that makes it more interesting, but also it's the right size. So at one point when I when I decided to shift from working in kind of corporate land, I knew that I wanted to work on place, and that the best place I could work on was the place that I lived in that I knew the best and that I cared about the most So I started my own, kind of, I hesitate to call it consultancy, like formerly it was, you know, it was registered with companies house and I paid tax and things like that. But actually, it was an experiment. So I set it up as a kind of one year experiment, I knew it wasn't going to have longevity, I was never going to try and employ people and things like that. And it was a mechanism for me to shift fields. So to shift from kind of corporate consulting into social innovation, and play space, social innovation, so I did some work for clients to, you know, pay for the mortgage and things like that. And but mostly I ran and kind of community projects or personal projects that had some influence on Brighton and, and there was quite a lot of stuff that I learned from that. Partly that once you start saying that you're interested in something and working in that space, then more things happen. And so I had an opportunity to work with white Sussex on them a play space project in Bognor Regis. And that that kind of that was work that gave me money in in the space that I was still interested in. But it was kind of thinking more about. This isn't necessarily true of Bogner. But the kind of intense the kind of conceptual things that I'm interested in, it's a it's cities as a place where and where people meet. And it's not necessarily city cities or cattle, but like towns and interesting to particularly interested in faded seaside towns for some reason. But um, there's a phrase, which is that cities are a serendipity engine. And I was interested in serendipity engines, which is a way of kind of engineering serendipity, which makes it sound like you shouldn't really be able to engineer serendipity. But you can. And there's various people have kind of written about how some places at some points in time become these kind of amazing spaces when new ideas happen. And so there are certain conditions that make that happen. But some of it, most of it is about the confluence of certain people in certain places. And, and some of the conditions for that are the kind of extraordinary mix of people. So different people with different ideas from all over the place. And obviously, that's, you know, can be called collective intelligence, and all those sorts of things. But there are various communities that have popped up at various times and produced extraordinary advances in lots of different things. And I'm interested in that, I suppose. And I started off being interested in that. And in terms of a place where people come together, and so cities are serendipity engines is a kind of catch all for that. But then I also started thinking about what's the role of spaces, particular spaces within a place. So there are some buildings, for instance, where extraordinary things start to happen. And and so I started thinking about that as a sort of social supercollider. Actually, how do you bring people together, and through events or places that that make new ideas happen, and, and so that's all about kind of advancement, I suppose, but advancement for the benefit of all. And, and so in order to, I suppose, formalise or consolidate some of that learning and learn from other people who've been doing this stuff for a long time, I joined Nesta, and, and, and within Nestor, I've had the opportunity to work on particular programmes have helped me and maybe expand that thinking and, and also spend some time with people who are actually working in places and have not just the kind of aspirational, conceptual underpinning that I'm interested in and have built up myself, but also kind of the nitty gritty How does this work?Will McInnes 13:48 Yeah, that's what I'm really curious about is it sounds really cool, like serendipity engines? Yes, please, I'd like one, what what are the manifestations or practical examples that we could kind of sink our teeth into.Jenni Lloyd 14:03 So I don't know who has actually cracked this. But what I can see is kind of signals like little signs and things that you could amplify and and join together. So over the last year or so, I've been running a programme called the upstream collaborative and which is was a kind of active learning network for 20 local councils. And those councils are kind of pioneering different ways of working. And the ways that they're working are very much about playing a particular kind of role as as kind of leaders within an ecosystem of other organisations. So institutions, organisations, communities, and individuals. And so that idea of well it goes back to sort of network thinking I think is, is an organisation like a local authority having a role as a kind of major node in the network. What I've realised I'm interested in is how we organise ourselves. And so it started off, when we were thinking about democratic business, how how we organise to get the best ideas, and the most out of people is when people are network together, loosely as opposed to create it into hierarchies, which limit thinking. So there's another phrase which I like, which is that the hierarchies of yesterday are no match for the speed required today. And, and so hierarchies are slow. And unless they're completely autocratic, and if they're autocratic, there's a weakness in that you're relying on one person to know everything. And that, for me, feels foolish. Whereas if you operate as a network, and with kind of strong links between different things, and different people, then you can operate at speed, particularly if everyone has a sort of clear idea of the kind of shared purpose and what the kind of values and principles are that bound what you do. So that feels like an organising principle that can be true within business, but also within any human space. And so the upstream collaborative counsels, I think, starting to behave as a node in the network, as opposed to an organisation at the top of a tree. And it's, you know, it's, it's fairly nascent, I think, and maybe not as conceptually clear as that. But in order to behave like that, then they have to change their relationships, they have to change the way they operate, and they have to change the way they think about power. And so like, where power lies, I think is one of the things that shapes how we organise ourselves, and and who has power, who can give it away how we can share that power, in a network power is more distributed.Will McInnes 16:53 So this upstream collaborative project that you've been running, what was it seeking to do? Or how has it taken shape? What's been interesting to you about how it's panned out? Yeah, weJenni Lloyd 17:05 set it up cases, we can see that there's a kind of shift happening in local government. And I suppose I want to say something about local government. And maybe people think councils are boring. I know, whenever we're having conversations, kind of, you know, not, not not, not in work or whatever. But in the majority, people just think about the council's as being people who are late with the bins, or too expensive in terms of the parking. But and local government is fundamentally important. And, and a key part of the kind of democratic system, which I think we've kind of lost sight of. And so they hold the closest relationship between systems state. So our interactions with the council happen every day for everyone. So that feels really, really important to me. And councils are really, really interesting. So obviously, there's a whole load of stuff about central government, which is really difficult to get your head around. And it's less difficult to get your head around and the relationship between city and state when you think about the local level. And that's I'm really, really interested in that. So there is a shift happening in the way local government is operating. And we've sort of identified that. But we wanted to know what the nature of that shift was in the scale of it. So was it just a few good stories that kept on being retold? Or was this something kind of more significant happening? And originally, we were thinking we would run a programme. And but I think in trying to design the programme, we realised we didn't know enough. And so the best way that we could find, to, to find out more was to work with counsellors themselves. And so we thought that if we put together a network and join together the the pioneers, that actually we could help them to support each other, because it's hard making change in an environment that's, you know, bureaucratic and has statutory obligations, and all those sorts of things. So the change makers working in local government are really, really strong, but they need support. And they need to know that they're not alone. And so joining them together kind of gives them more power,Will McInnes 19:14 I think. So when you say there are a few good stories, can you help bring that to life for people who don't know this domain? Like what was what were these whiffs or signals that you were picking up on?Jenni Lloyd 19:24 So probably the primary one was the story around Preston. And so Preston is a town in Lincolnshire that, you know, he's kind of has a post industrial history and and over the last eight to 10 years, they've significantly and change their sort of economic structure using a model called Community wealth building. And what that says is that, that the local authority is a key player within a set of other institutions. which they call anchor institutions. And so by combining their, their sort of spending power, and creating rules around procurement that favour people within organisations within the local environment, then actually they can reshape their local economy. And they can also make commitments like so adopting the living wage, for instance, if the local university, the council, and the hospitals, you know, if if all the major of the police force for instance, if they all adopt the same principles around the living wage, then actually locally, and the average income rent rises. And, and that creates benefit all around. So economic benefit, and kind of flows from community wealth building. But it's not just about how you spend the money, it's also about the kind of purpose and ethos behind the work. So what kind of role that Council is taking, in terms of its relationship with citizens, and the outcome is seeking for the town. So economic development within places for a long time has been, and let's get a major investor, to pay for the creation of a shopping mall, you know, that sort of thing. So some kind of big multinational contracts will then construct a huge shopping mall, and then kind of global retail partners will then populate that shopping mall. And people will go and spend money there. And that sort of, you know, has happened everywhere. So, you know, it's a really common pattern. But if you think about where the economic benefit for that lies, it doesn't necessarily lie in the place where that shopping mall is constructed. It's, you know, it lives with the investors who, you know, make money from the from the stock price. So it's kind of that doesn't necessarily benefit the town in the way that it was supposed to. So instead, they're kind of like rethinking about, well, what kind of place do we want to have? What kind of economic structure Do we need to benefit the people in that place? So anyway, the Preston model has become a kind of a good story, and, and is being adopted elsewhere. So other other towns are following the lead. And community wealth building is kind of growing. And but there's other towns, so Barnsley, for instance, and Oldham and have all started working in different ways. And, and they're kind of, you know, you notice that they're the northern towns, and the North has a particular history in terms of being post industrial, and having, you know, bad economic problems. So there's also a massive discrepancy in terms of wealth, and between the North and South. So, you know, I think we often say that the UK is the kind of fifth largest economy in the world, that's mostly London, if you stripped London out of it, we're way down the leaves. So actually, there's a kind of huge inequality in terms of economics. And we can see that that trickles down into all of the kind of social aspects of life. And I think that inequality is one of the biggest problems that that we suffer from, and contend to social problems. So anyway, there are other towns, like Barnes and Oldham, who are adopting different models, and Barnsley, for instance, have changed the way almost the role of the counsellor. So they've almost like the job description of the elected member is much more about being a kind of community activist. And, andthere is a kind of money given to at the ward level. And so the local community can decide how to spend that budget. So it's a kind of almost like a redistribution of the spending power, and the decision making power back into the community. And that, again, is something that speaks to not just economics, but about community connection, and, and democracy. So, which if we want to rebuild democracy, which I believe we need to, then those are the kinds of activities that are starting to do that on the ground. And, and so those are the kinds of stories that were coming up. We had some target councils that we wanted to attract into the collaborative. And so bonds in Oldham did join the collaborative, so depressed and and we wanted Wigan and but we didn't get and so the Wigan deal is also kind of a kind of well known story, which is about kind of creating a different social contract. So, it's kind of like there is a specific contract, which is that if citizens within Wigan perform these particular activities than the council will guarantee them a kind of very low council tax. So it's a quite transactional but really groundbreaking. When it came about, and one that lots of others other councils have tried to follow in terms of actually, what is the contract between this organisation, the state's run organisation, and the citizens who live in a place?Will McInnes 25:13 This is great. So what's coming through for me is, like this sense of cities as a unit. Like, that's what you're getting me excited about is I'm starting to see cities as a play Park, or a sandbox or a, like some kind of unit of change. And then within that, you're talking about redistribution, you're talking about democracy activism, engagement, like whether it's transactional, or or, or different somehow. So too, so that's what you're excited about?Jenni Lloyd 25:48 Yeah. And they go? No. Yes. So and there's lots of stuff that I've been learning. So I'm in running the collaborative. And we spent quite a lot of time on the sort of discovery phase. So we went around, and we visited lots of different places. And so I had a good few months, kind of going around to places that I'd never visited before, like, red car, I can never been to red car. There's lots of places like Barnsley, I've never been to Bozeman, and, and seeing what those places are, like, and hearing about the work of the council is doing there. And trying to understand what's driving that? What, what is driving this change, and, and not just that, but what's enabling it, what's getting in the way, but what is it and, and, and it was different, you know, in each place, there was sort of variations between the initiatives that they'd undertaken. And, but there seemed to be commonality in terms of the sense of purpose. And, and for a long time, I've been interested in purpose as a kind of driver, and lightweight back, sort of from next mechanist days. And, but having a really clear sense of purpose. So in, in public service, which, you know, is interesting favourite anyway, because it talks about being in service. And there is always, I think, a background ethos of wanting to do the right thing. But, um, and wanting to help people. But organizationally, I think we've managed to constrain that to the point of that a lot of people really, really frustrated. So public services being treated as a commercial entity, for instance, and hierarchies and bureaucracies that get in the way of people doing the job, and maybe a lack of trust in terms of the public servant. And so thinking that they need checklists, because otherwise they'll do the wrong thing. And, and actually, a lot of those constraints are being broken by the kind of counsellors we've been working with. So instead, they're thinking more about trust, and empowerment for staff. So recognising that actually, fundamentally, most people are trying to do the right thing. And if you enable them to do that, then they can actually make better decisions than if you just conform to a checklist. And, but there's a kind of probably something bigger in terms of the the background to all this, which is austerity. And, and so for 10 years, the amount of money going into local government has fallen by 35%, something like that. There's no other organisations, I don't think, no other system that could take that scale of reduction of revenue. And I don't think it's really recognised just what a good job most councils have been trying to do. So they have statutory and, and things that they have to do. They have to look after children who need care, for instance, they have to look after all people that you know, that there are statutory obligations. And we can see this, that social care is falling apart, it's falling apart because it's not got enough money. And it can't behave as a business. Because that's not a market anyone wants, in some richer places, actually, social care and is, is less of a problem because people can afford to pay for, you know, nicer, and care homes. But generally, these are not places where the market works. And and so the kind of ethos of kind of commercialization and market driven stuff, it just doesn't work. And and I think it's been proven not to work. So it needs something else. And I thinkin my head, I've called a lot of these councils like f**k it councils, because it's like they've got twin drivers of austerity, ongoing, massive austerity and reductions in in revenue. Plus a completely changing world. So the complexity that we're all experiencing in business everywhere else, councils experience that you've got ageing populations, you've got changing needs of people, you've got a changing sort of levels of demand. So the demand is rising, particularly as the whole economy kind of falls away, then, then more people need help from public services. And so they've got all of these drivers. And over 10 years, they've tried prudently to make things more efficient to cut here to cut there, they call it salami slicing. And, and in the end, there's nothing left. Like you can't make any more efficient. And he kind of, he can't spend less. And so they're kind of gone. F**k it, what else can we do? And a lot of them I've actually used that, I think is an opportunity to, to reconnect to the idea of what is it we're trying to do? And we want to make people's lives better? And then what is our role in this? And, and so a lot of them have decided that the right thing to do is to head upstream is to thank you. So if you think about, I don't like a hospital as being downstream as an institution, you end up there because something bad has happened. How do you stop that bad thing from happening? So for instance, loneliness, like, loneliness leads to mental health problems, which leads people to the GP, which leads to prescriptions. How do you create a community that provides people with the opportunity to connect, and therefore in conditions like bereavement or you know, like circumstances in their lives? How can the community play a part that prevents loneliness that prevents anxiety and depression that prevents the prescription? And so it's kind of how do you how do you create the conditions for people to flourish. And, and that's what these councils are trying to do. And that's why I find them like totally inspiring, because they're trying to do it within massive constraints. But they're trying to do it in the face of, you know, kind of personal difficulties as well, because to be the person trying to do something different in a system is hard. They're doing it, and they are having results. And there are stories in there that can be joined together, they can learn from each other, they can support each other, they can be amplified. And I think if you were to, to become if this way of operating was to become more mainstream, actually, you'd have a very, very different system, one where more people will be able to float. So that's what I find.Will McInnes 32:35 That's incredibly exciting. I absolutely love it, it's really enjoyable. And I'm sure they'd love that badge, you've given them of being f*****g count. We are proud members, founding members of the fuckit Brigade, IJenni Lloyd 32:48 have to say that hasn't come up in any of the reports we've just published. It'sWill McInnes 32:52 not official, that's, that's your own special code. So So, what if there is this emergence, early emergence of a new mode, a new way of being for these local governments? Or these institutions What? What characterises it, as you see, as you see this shift happening? What is there less of and what is there more of?Jenni Lloyd 33:23 So I think it comes back to the kind of organisations they are. And and, and that's why the work ended up being about operating models. And for a long time, I couldn't get anyone excited, I couldn't really get excited about the time new operating models myself. And it took me a while to make the link. So I was more upstream. I was more excited about the upstream part of things. And you know, kind of actually how do you stop problems before they happen? And but a colleague was the one who was kind of she was banging on about your pricing models for ages. And she laid the foundations for the work. And, and it's because in order. Sothe kind of work that these councils are doing are innovations. But they're the kind of innovations that there's a term which is architectural innovations. They're the kind of innovations that require a different kind of organisation in order to deliver them effectively. And there is other examples from the commercial world and once I realised that if I of course, right. So why why did Xerox give away the GUI to Apple, you know, so So, why were they unable to deliver on the promise of that? Why did Nakia not make a smartphone, you know, like, there are lots of technological innovations and which are created by existing organisations that can't, they can't change themselves enough to deliver on them. And but within the world of kind of public service, a council doesn't have a disrupter. They can't be an apple. I've heard someone saying, you know, to local authorities, you know that, yeah, you need to be more Netflix than blockbuster. And it's kinda like, it's a nice phrase. But how, how do you do that. And then in one of the first conversation, someone said, something like, you've got to change the wheel while you're driving the car. And it's true, like they can't stop doing what they're doing. Like they can't stop providing services for people who need them. And but at the same time, they also have to do new things. And they also don't have an r&d fund, or any kind of investment in innovation, there isn't anything. So how do you do new stuff. And so what I think the kind of councils within the upstream collaborative have been doing is they've been creating a new operating model for themselves. And, and that operating model is this kind of purpose on one side, and outcomes. On the other hand, the operating model provides a bridge between purpose and outcomes. And right in the middle of that is mindset. So the mindset that they've adopted, is very different. So it's collaborative. And it sees itself as, as part of a system as a, you know, a kind of leader within a system, but definitely not the sole player. And, and it kind of takes the kind of system view of a place. So and that kind of mindset in in infuses everything. And so there's a set of values in place, which there was a lot of commonality between the values that we could see. But there's also kind of principles, which are almost like design principles. So almost, I always think about principles as being like instructions for how you do what you do. And so this operating model, I think, the top half of it, because we obviously have made a pretty diagram of it. The top half of it is about being so like, the kind of like the more sort of fundamental fundamentals or worldviews or belief driven stuff. And then the bottom half of it is infrastructure and capabilities. And I think very often, like people looking at organisations only really see infrastructure and capabilities. But how those infrastructure and capabilities are put into place, and put into use is massively influenced by and the kind of values principles and the kind of underpinning mindset. And so the way that people, for instance, are put into place, and how you believe those people should behave, like what kind of tools they use, all that sort of thing. It's all influenced by the mindsets underneath it. So so that's the kind of the work that's come out of it, which is to be able to almost like codify, what is the difference? And in in, in being able to codify it? How do you create a narrative around it, that means other people can adopt it? And that's kind of what we've been publishing over the last couple of weeks, is a kind of new operating models handbook. So like setting out the, the, like what we've seen, and case studies from different councils, but then also like, how do you take it from the margins to the mainstream? How do you overcome some of the barriers, and some of the biggest barriers are things like, attributes was risk, huge, and ways of measuring, so measuring targets, KPIs, all that sort of stuff, fundamentally influence how people deliver the job. So all of those things have kind of come up. And we've kind of written about them, and tried to, in a way, sort of disseminate them. But I think that it comes back to, again, the way that we organise. And I think one of the mostkind of exciting moments for me was when I understood why, and so many councils were so interested in something called an asset based community development, which is a terrible name. If, if I had my way, it would be renamed but it it already had its thing, so it can't be renamed. But ABCD kind of is a way of operating within communities. And very often it can be just communities within themselves. But local authorities can play a part and the part that they play can be as an enabler of the capacity of the community. And there was something really, really important in terms of mindset in that which is instead of seeing communities as being pockets of demand, so places that have needs that public service. system service. And instead to see them as places that are full of different assets. And those assets might be might be things might be places might be green spaces might be village halls, you know, all those other places that could provide opportunities for people to gather, also people themselves and the skills they have the passions, they have the appetites they have, you know, there is something fundamental about, I think we all know, people within a community who kind of go like, No, we need this. And, and very often they, they have the energy to gather people around them, and they make things happen, local authorities can find those people, they can find those places. And by doing that they can almost create an abundance, where austerity is dictated that there is scarcity, but actually, there's almost infinite capacity within communities, and the local authorities that have realised that have taken a very different approach. And for me, that's the kind of key thing alongside and heading upstream, and understanding themselves as being players within the wider system. And also seeing the capacity and their ability to unlock that capacity in communities. Those feel like the fundamentals of changingWill McInnes 41:19 that is awesome. I love it. And does that take us then to, to eudaimonia? Like, are we full circle yet? Or are we not quite ready for utopia?Jenni Lloyd 41:30 So are we Yeah, so, um, in terms of outcomes and purpose, and the way that we hesitate to say eudaemonia in public service land, in fact, I don't think I've ever said that to the council's. But we've entered instead, sort of recognise that the purpose that the councils are playing, or kind of have taken on board is their role in creating the conditions for people in place to flourish. And that the outcomes, therefore, should be flourishing people and flourishing places. And if you think about that, you can break that down into a set of goals, you know, like indicators, rather about, like, how would you know that someone was flourishing? Like, the sort of, economically you can look at Preston, for instance, and look at the increase in average income, that would dictate, you know, like, that would be a good indicator, but you can also think about non financial returns. And, and so I've spent some time thinking about that. And in fact, last year, we created a board game, and it's to try and work through or, or, by playing to help people understand the different aspects of, of what a flourishing community might look like. But, um, there's a, there's a psychologist I was working with, and she introduced me to some work, and that they created a group called psychologists against austerity. And, and they'd, they'd started looking at, well, what are they? And what aspects of psychological health exist within people and communities, and they broken it down into kind of five indicators. And, you know, lots of people are talking about well, GDP is the wrong indicator of of health of a nation, for instance. And let's so there's a movement towards looking at well being indicators. But these five aspects of psychological health felt to me they just feel really right. And so, like a core one is agency. So to what degree do people feel that they have some choice in the decisions that they make in the way that they lead their lives, and security, so how security you feel in your neighbourhood? And I'm going to find it difficult to remember five, but connection. So to what degree do you feel connected to where you live, and the people around you? And I can't remember the other two, and in the councils that we've been sort of working with, so for instance, Leeds, Leeds, and we were working with the kind of adult social health department. And they've gone heavy on asset based community development, and particularly around isolation and loneliness, because connection is the antidote to loneliness, collection, connection and belonging, which is one of the other five and so that comes from communities. So I don't think most people want a befriending service. You know, do you want someone who is your friend because it's their job? And or do you instead you you want to feel like you walk down the street and you recognise people, people recognise you, you know, those sorts of things. And so, leads have put in place, kind of one of their KPIs is that everyone in Leeds should have three good friendsand you know, like How many? How many times have you thought that that's the job of the council, but it's not, you know, they're not making people have friends through pretending services, they're creating the conditions through which people can make connections with people who will become their friends. And so that creates a network of support that goes way beyond what public services can deliver. So it's kind of public services should be the kind of net, but the actual kind of flourishing place would provide those things anyway. And it's almost like self sustaining. Because the more connected a community is, the more connected it becomes. And so for me, that feels like again, the that we look at resources in terms of money. And I think that there's a mistake or a misunderstanding of the resources that are available to us. And so austerity dictates that there's not enough money and and that we can't pay for this. And so therefore, it kind of breeds a desperate scrabbling and a competition for resources. Where if we see money as just being one of the resources that's available to us, but actually, we have all these other resources that are available within communities, then actually, that shifts us into a kind of abundance mindset. Because you can't, you know, you can't have too much connection, you can't have too much belonging. So it's kind of, I think that that's what we're starting to see. And I do believe there's a kind of there is starting to be a kind of almost international movement around looking at what are what what is a good place, what is a good life, and recognising that actually, money isn't much to do with it. I do want to say, obviously, that I don't believe that we should be defunding public services. And that's the kind of key criticism that can be levelled at any work that looks at driving the capacity of the community. Because there's a horrible kind of legacy of David Cameron's kind of big society, which is basically that we have volunteers can deliver public services. And that's, you know, monstrously untrue. And, and so there is always the need for a fully funded state, and fully funded public services. But there's different ways of creating the conditions that in which people's needs can be met. And they don't necessarily lie within public services.Will McInnes 47:26 Amazing, really, really interesting. And I can see and feel a sense of coming full circle, when he talks about how more connections compound and create more connections, I could see a trace back to the, to your opening, excitement and love of cities, I've always thought of cities as Super connected networks. And back to your serendipity engines. So the report that you released, I'll include it in the show notes, but if you just give us a quick shout out of what it's called, or where people can find it,Jenni Lloyd 48:00 yeah, it's, um, it's a set of six reports, and which are kind of collected together under the name and new operating models handbook. And the handbook is really aimed at being a kind of practitioners guide to new ways of working in local government. So there's kind of six parts, there's the introduction to new operating models, which talks about the drivers, and it talks about what the model that we've seen emerging, and it gives examples of how that's being put into place by different councils. And so it kind of gives a shout out to the, to the different councils have been involved in the upstream collaborative. And then we've got kind of different more sort of tool based papers. So actually, how do you move this from the margins, the mainstream, what are the enablers? And that would enable this kind of shift to grow within an individual organisation? And how do you think about risk? So reframing risk is one of our papers. And, and also, we did some kind of rapid research over the COVID period, to see how local authorities were responding to COVID. And what's and what benefits the new operating model they've already adopted and would have in that instance, and so there's a paper specifically dedicated to that. And so yeah, six papers, new operating models handbook. Everyone should read it.Unknown Speaker 49:23 I'm sure they will.Will McInnes 49:26 And as we as we bring this brilliant conversation to a close, I suppose. Just briefly, your appetite for what snacks like Well, what I love about you, Jenni is you're you're just relentless curiosity and restless inquiry into the world. So what's what's next for your interest? What are you interested to follow up on?Jenni Lloyd 49:53 Want to keep going on this frame and I'm not done with local government and I'm not done with places, I think I've just scratched the surface to be honest. And so there is a movement called, so difficult to say, I don't know why the things I'm interested in always have bad names, but this is a new municipalism which is something that I want to get more involved in to explore further, and new economic models. So new economic models being about ownership, and, and kind of more distributed forms of ownership within kind of businesses, social enterprises, things like that. I'm really interested in community owned assets, for instance, very interested in community land trusts, and that fundamentally, everything comes down to who owns what, and the inequality of who owns what, and how a lot of that is based in, you know, William the Conqueror, giving loads of lands to people who helped him, you know, kind of win. And, and that's still being the basis, and for a lot of our ownership structures, and and that's still having an impact, really interested in actually how do you create more distributed forms of ownership and in terms of kind of places, and but also how you encourage communities to take ownership of things themselves, how you kind of almost liberate communities, and what impact that has in, in the kind of sense of connection that they have. So that feels like something I want to explore. And I'm still really interested in local government. So anything that could join together, new operating models, new economic models, and new municipal ism, all the news. And, and ideally, obviously, in Brighton, but not sure about that. And I suppose the other sort of really big thing that's on the horizon. And that I haven't connected with fully but I want to is, and the work of the donut economics lab, which is Kaypro worth and exploration of how donut economics can be and cited in a place. So she's been doing some really great work in Amsterdam, and has created a platform to see how it could be proliferating to other places. And I want to get involved in some of that. But I think the thing that I'm always interested in is how they connect. And so I think that's probably what I'm most interested in is connecting things. And so all of those things that I just said that had new in front of them, and plus donut economics. And yeah, I want to find an opportunity for that somewhere somehow.Will McInnes 52:33 I absolutely love that journey. And I challenge myself and anyone listening to this, to come up with as immediate and interesting sounding list of things that one is currently pursuing. That is what life is about is about. What's next. What am I interested in? What am I learning about? I absolutely love it. So thank you so much, Jenni. And where can people follow your pursuits and interests online? Is there a sort of place we can point people toJenni Lloyd 53:01 probably still Twitter. And so at Jenni Lloyd genuine I know he and but also, I mean, the stuff we've published is all on the Nesta website and hopefully will be for some time to come. Very cool. Jenni Lloyd, jeWill McInnes 53:16 Je n n. I LLOYD. Good stuff. Thank you so much for joining me on the conversation today. Jenni.Jenni Lloyd 53:25 Thank you very much Will. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://hererightnow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">hererightnow.substack.com</a>

November 27, 2020

#9: Fighting Covid-19, first virus then misinformation with Dr Dominic Pimenta

Fighting Covid-19 on the frontlines to save critically ill patients - what must that be like? As an NHS doctor in the UK seconded to emergency intensive care wards, <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/DrDomPimenta">Dr Dominic Pimenta</a> was right there as the first tidal wave broke over London, UK. And with that began a mission, first by founding a <a target="_blank" href="https://healthcareworkersfoundation.org/">charity</a> to equip his fellow healthcare professionals with the support and resources they needed. And now by <a target="_blank" href="https://modernsocietyinitiative.org/">pursuing the misinformation</a> swirling around the topic, misinformation potentially as deadly as the virus itself with the ability to cause of many hundreds of thousands more deaths.In this fascinating conversation, we hear Dr Dom’s first-hand perspective on the rapidly evolving reality of public health through this pandemic. From the visceral, practical reality of ‘charging through corridors’ setting up new intensive care wards and the emotions from discharging the first recovered patients, into the curiosity of the human condition - why do not just laypeople but also medics, scientists and even epidemiologists find themselves falling for the allure of misinformation.Links* <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/drdompimenta?lang=en">Dr Dominic Pimenta</a> - Twitter* <a target="_blank" href="https://www.helpthemhelpus.co.uk/">Healthcare Workers Foundation</a> - charity.* <a target="_blank" href="http://modernsocietyinitiative.org/">Modern Society Initiative</a> - thinktank. * <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Duty-Care-everyone-should-COVID-19-ebook/dp/B089QRNCKP">Duty of Care</a> - Dom’s latest book, ‘a tense and gripping account of the unfolding pandemic from a doctor who was there’. With all royalties going to the HWF charity.Credits* Big thank you to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonny-sawyer-31360b35/?originalSubdomain=au">Jonny Sawyer</a> for introducing Dom* Music by <a target="_blank" href="https://leerosevere.bandcamp.com/">Lee Rosevere</a> Automated transcriptWill McInnes 0:00 I am very excited to be here today with Dr. Dom or Dominic Pimenta, who is a doctor but also wears quite a few different hats. so dumb. You're a doctor in your day job. You're the chair of the healthcare workers foundation. Yeah. A director of the modern society initiative. and author of duty of care.Dr Dominic Pimenta 0:23 That's right. Yeah, that's all. Good. I suppose they can. They can. Yeah.Will McInnes 0:30 And other responsibilities? Our Yeah. Let's just park the family. And other I guess if we start at the beginning, like with all good stories, how did you end up becoming a doctor? Like, what's your path?Dr Dominic Pimenta 0:45 Well, I like to tell you that there's some sort of fictional childhood event where somebody was sick. And then the doctor came out nicely, it's really boring. I can't honestly remember why I wanted to be a doctor, I can't remember ever not wanting to be a doctor. So it's like that. I don't have access to have the best. It's a weird thing for doctors that I don't have the best memory. So events that are five to 10 years old, I really sometimes really struggle. So I do wonder if there was something I remember looking out a window once and thinking, Oh, when I die, I don't have any money. This was this because what my family or christian right, so we talked about death and heaven all the time. So I had this idea that when I die, I can't take any money with me. So what's the point in money, which actually is a very bad attitude, I've only just realised that I have. And I need to talk out now because I've got kids. But at the time, I was like, oh, okay, so what will be useful? And then I had this idea vaguely that, you know, after we all die, maybe the people I looked after, or whatever, maybe that's why I don't know, it's very vague. But the really the honest answer is I don't remember. And I was always on this pathway, since I don't know, like five or six. And anybody would say, What do you want? Do you want to be a doctor, and I just, you know, pick my GCSEs A Levels and, and very foolishly applied to for medical schools assumed again, all of them didn't get into it. Now, I've got to tell you, I've got into one of them. And I just assumed I was gonna go to medical school. So I applied for medical school, went to the interview, didn't really prepare at all, and spent the night before the interview just going out with the other interviewees there because you know, this is gonna, I'm going to walk this. And then I sat down, and weirdly enough, I'd read about Oxbridge interviews, right. And I thought, because I came from a state schools, I had no idea. I didn't know anybody. They've been taught to Cambridge. And I read this thing that in Oxford interviews, they want you to be weird and wacky, and show all your different thoughts and make weird connections. But that's probably not the case for medical school interview. So I turned up, and they showed me these pictures, this is the like, thing, right? They showed me these pictures of different like anatomy, I think there's some cells, there's like lots of things that you would make sensible medical connections with. And then I really hadn't really prep very much and had no idea what most of the stuff was. So I made lots of weak connections. And like the last two or three, I actually run out of ideas as well. So I just like, they were like, why did you put these two together with Oh, they're both sort of brown. And they look to me, like, what's wrong with you? And I thought that would be quite abstract and quirky. And they thought that you have just ruined this interview for us. And you know, at the end, they were like, Okay, do you have any questions that are just asked you, and I'm here. And obviously, I didn't get in. And actually, that was quite interesting. For the first time I'd ever sort of thought, Oh, actually, this pathway is not going to work out. And I had a sort of existential crisis. And then very weirdly, on the day of eucast, I was only allowed to apply to one London medical school. And but obviously, because I came from the south coast, and my mom was like, if you go to London, you're gonna get stabbed. So you can only apply to one. And that doesn't make any sense, right? But anyway, that's what that's what that's actually what happened. And on the day of UK, some some Sunday Times list or something came out and then I Imperial was my choice for like, the whole time. And on that single day, I just changed my choice for no reason at all, other than I seen something on the internet about five minutes before from Imperial to UCL. And I got into UCL. And that's where my wife and you know, we have kids and you know, this is funny how life just flips like that. And yeah, and that's when I went to medical school and have a great time really is it's amazing, central London, very different. And then I six years and then so finished in 2012 and went to work in so me and my wife flux of LinkedIn applications together. So we went to work and what we thought was quite a small deanery in Oxford. But very weirdly, we didn't talk about the jobs that we would apply for, doesn't apply for nearly exactly the same jobs. So I actually did, we did the same jobs for two years. So I would do the job. I think I was first I would do it. And then she would be the next doctor following me. Which is really funny because we could be About the same people, right, and you know all the ins and outs when you come into the, into the department. So it was actually it's actually great. And then after two years, we came back to London. And then I became a heart doctor, and was a heart doctor from 2016. And in various London hospitals, up until basically September this year, so about two months ago.Will McInnes 5:25 Love it, that's already a brilliant and interesting beginning, we're going to be talking about misinformation around COVID. And you've written this book, about your experiences on the frontline, as a doctor working in ICU. everyone listening to this will want to want to hear a little bit about that experience. So just give us a flavour of of what it was like whether it's through a story or whether it's just your overall experience. What was it like, being a doctor working on the frontlines of this pandemic?Dr Dominic Pimenta 6:02 Yeah, I mean, the book decides to quit plug for the book there. So it's, um, it's called duty of care. And actually, if you get out before the 30th of November, it only 99 p on Kindle right now, and actually got, I'm currently in the charts. I'm 28. And Obama is 27. I don't know this Obama guy, the pandemic, I found myself weirdly across lots of different elements of it like right at the beginning. Me and my wife were really super anxious about it, thought it was going to be this catastrophic, global changing event. And then weirdly turned out to be pretty much right about that, which was the curveball, I think, no, everyone else thought that we were insane actually have to say for like four weeks. And there's this really horrible isolating period of going up to people saying, Ah, Covid is coming, have you done the numbers, we're gonna have thousands in it. And they were like, Nah, be okay. But you know, they're completely on the other side of this glass. And we'd already stepped through that, you know, into this weird world. And weirdly, for us, I suppose, when the lockdown came in, you know, and everyone, we were sort of on TV calling for early lockdown. And it's all very controversial. But a week later, there we are full lockdown. Everybody stay at home. It was weird. Like, I mean, lots people wouldn't be very anxious. But for us, it was a big relief, because at least everybody's on the same page. So remember that sort of being the first like transition from the sort of real ish world to something entirely surreal. And I actually remember for like the first, you know, most of March and, and lots of February and loads of doctor's experiences, nobody was sleeping, everybody who was thinking about this was not sleeping, because it's just this gnawing anxiety that you can't do anything about, I talk about in the book of exactly that sensation of like a tidal wave on the horizon. And you can see it and you know, what's going to happen, and it's coming, and about 90% of the people in the beach, do not want to hear it. And that is really like a horrible thing to feel I don't ever want to have to be like it. But once it happened, and then it was sort of like this, you know, and it weirdly, again, it sounds weird, but actually dealing with crisis in emergencies is kind of like the gears that you're taught as a doctor. So actually, that bit is much more not easy to deal with, but you have the gears to deal with it. But having said that, it did feel especially because we were in London, it did feel exactly like a huge wave just crashing. And what's really like different I suppose to how maybe other crises in the past were experienced by individuals was we have access to people's thoughts from WhatsApp. I'm in a WhatsApp junior doctor group. And it was like the whole you know, you could get the sensation of the whole of London I boiling and seething with all of these crazy stories, you know, day one, North Park hospital, we're going to be fine. Day two, black alert, day three. It's like the worst hit country, the worst Hospital in the country. And that happened in just 48 hours. And like people just have never seen anything like this before. And it was exactly I think everybody had that sensation. I we've never seen anything like this before. I mean, I've worked in horrible flu seasons about tonight to you a little bit before I was a heart doctor is one of my rotations. So I had some flavour of it. But really, it was just, you know, we had stories about hospitals closing because they ran out of oxygen or hospitals closings, they had no beds, like situations that had never happened. You know, the idea that the oxygen could run out of the wall was completely insane to like most people if you weren't if you didn't work in the States, you never thought about that. It's like saying, you know that the air ran out in in actual the actual air right? It's just doesn't happen in medicine. So where I was working, we were working in a sort of tertiary hospital. So we would take patients and and we had the, I suppose luxury but we had to close all of our operations, close loads of our normal activity and the doctors I myself were parachuted in to intensive care. So I started in quite early on about the sort of middle of March, end of March. And it was just, it was I thought about the book because we work in shifts, right? And we all shift to a shift pattern, you do not have to three shifts on four shifts, or three shifts, which is quite unusual actually, for doctors, nurses do that all the time. But it had this weird sort of staccato effect where you'd come in and see what's going on. See these patients coming in and sort of that, but it didn't, it didn't come in, like the deluge that you'd expect. It came in big jobs. So you come in, you know, the first shift, I think I worked in one, it was full of COVID patients already. And we're like, wow, that's quick. There's 12 patients. And then the next time I came in, which was almost a week later, so you do four days off, and you come back in, there's two it us, right, so it's doubled. And that's it. But that was happening, right? The the patients were doubling every two to three days. And that was the that was true from the end of February. And that's why you could see this long tail into the future, which was terrifying. And then actually, we ended up having for it like fourth completely new it is in the six it is in total at the hospital, and more and more patients and we started running out of drugs, we ran out of the drug to sedate people out of the drugs to paralyse people for ventilation. But what was really interesting actually was over time, or at least where we worked, that the attitude very much changed. At the beginning, it was very grim. And everybody was very much in the sort of this is going to be horrible and traumatic, and there's actually not much we can do, we'll just try to do our best keep people ventilated, but most of these patients will die that because that was the data we had, right. And we had and from China, and from Italy, about 80% of people weren't surviving intensive care. But over the course of the pandemic, obviously, actually care got much better. And one of the big drivers of that is probably resources. So where places like Lombardi were completely overwhelmed, they had no resources, and then instantly the death rate spirals. And that's exactly why you know, the lock downs we have now so important because there's only in the NHS particularly has various capacity. And anyway, it's coping right now, even we are locked down is the fact that it's already cancelled all the operations, again, to cope basically to any stays in ICU, etc. So over the course of the pandemic, and over the course of this sort of six weeks, you know, locked down for us was a tangible thing, we had this huge expansion, and then this tail off around the end of April, and then patients started getting better again, because we had the luxury of expanding, we didn't have to stop, we didn't have to say we've got no more beds, we just kept going kept creating and creating charging through car doors. So we had the option of having patients on ventilators for 689 weeks. And remarkably, a huge number of those, the ones that we had written off not written off in the sense like that, but like I was particularly pessimistic about go better. And actually, I remember sort of end of April discharging our first patient discharge out of there, like 10,000 patients by now something from one war to another of one, but it's completely and actually, it's kind of the boring thing, normally on a ward round. But we went round, and suddenly it was it was actually me I was the decision making register at that time, that would say you are fit for the ward. And obviously the plan have been for this guy to go to the wards for days for weeks before that. But it just happened to meet me at the end, it was actually like a really, I was actually generally very emotional. Because I was under them. You know, we were all under the impression that we were not discharged. Anybody. And actually there are some there were some hospitals at the time that really struggled. And certainly had very high mortality rates, but we we actually didn't.So we had this you know, people getting better and and going and eventually the you know, by what time I finished it by the end of August, we had no Covid patients. So we've gone, you know, and we're closing it us and this weird like party atmosphere as we're transferring patients and closing it down and closing it down. But even at that point, you know, even at that point, in augers cases, we're starting to rise again, in the young people. And then we have this weird this kind of a segue into maybe misinformation. But this weird Rise of the, I don't know what to what to call them really Rise of the pseudo scientists, the rise of the COVID denied it. And the first thing, the first time I caught wind of this was as cases arising, people started saying, Oh, that's just because of testing. It's like, but doesn't make any sense. Like, if you just look at it for five minutes, tests have gone up by this much in cases have gone up by two or three times that so it cannot be because of testing. It doesn't make sense. And yet, you know, Daily Mail spectator, Facebook, and my wife so it was some of these I think when you go on Facebook anymore, I haven't for years, actually. But um, she's in one of these doctors groups. And what really shocked me was some of this COVID denialism and, you know, pseudoscience was actually being talked about in all in seriousness by genuine real doctors. As I already think of it, what do you think of this as you're shaping this thing? And I actually I was sitting there because you know, having just done covert ICU, and there's this guy, it's called Ivor Cummins. You may have come across him. He's actually a I think he's actually an agent. up in a Hewlett Packard printer used to work, there was an engineer. Maybe he's got a keto book to sell. Because everybody who, who seems to be in the game has a keto book or a Diet book to sell. And he was making all these videos on YouTube and like gaining like a million views like, you know, and actually they've been taught by so I watched one I literally I've never you know that that spit take, you know, when you spit out that I was what I had a cup of tea about. I watched the first three minutes, I actually spat out on my laptop. And this was like what was like he's literally said about 100 completely factually incorrect things in the first three minutes. This is a 45 minute video. And that's kind of when I just like, you know, I kind of thought is this worth my time to like, look through as an intensive care. I've seen you know, I've seen things also I've seen a very skewed, I've seen the sickest people with COVID I haven't actually seen funnily enough, very well, people with COVID at all, because it just wasn't my department. I wasn't in any, I didn't work on the ward. So actually, I just saw the ones who were really, really sick and I needed to go and like lung bypass like this and called ECMO and the extreme end. But to me, it was like, you know, and the lockdown is like, this is all this is a real like, you know, this, I've seen it seen the numbers I can give you like the typical COVID patient and the number CT etc. And then to hear this guy be like, Oh, yeah, COVID not real, it's just as bad as fluid as like, this just doesn't just insane. But then it kind of really speaks to the fact that and this is you know, I think a big problem in the NHS actually, that because of the the politics and the media view and how politicised you know from from Whitehall. Basically, if you annoy Whitehall's the chief exec, you probably don't keep your job for very long. So, but almost, you know, and that's not to say that the managers and I've saved NHS managers over the course of pandemic, absolutely exemplary like we were working and made like you know, on call 24 seven all the time dealing with a crisis that nobody's trained no infrastructure for and yet still, you know, just doing the absolute best they can. But it does inherently mean that the top echelon is politicised. And actually what happens then? So we have this great, you know, very, very tough discussing with media having people in and there were a few, you know, bbc documentaries, or Channel Four, but mostly it was a closed shop. And there were very few people who were able to talk about it. And as a consequence, I think initially, everybody went with it, but naturally into the vacuum, people will start to insert Well, actually, the hospitals are empty, and they will I've just seen them on Tick tock, you know, I keep getting this is really annoying. just seen on Tick Tock dancing, so nothing's happening, or I've looked up the the NHS stats, and actually it says that the hospitals got loads of beds. So what are they talking about? And that, actually, I think it's very hard for lots of health care workers. I mean, I find it particularly offensive, but I think everybody finds pills like that. Because it's a horrible system. People are actually traumatised from from what happened. And I mean, nurses, more other health care workers more than doctors, I would imagine. Because it's, you know, this thing about being out of control and being powerless. And then you got this Irish guy who's like,Oh, yeah,he's got a nice voice. I give him that. Like, I go into it. But he, he talks about, you know, it's not happening, or it's just following natural curve or the pandemic over. And there was this real, I mean, everybody wants it to be over, you know, even people like even even my own sister, she was like, This is not happening. We're not having another way. And she was like, she co founded the charity with me. She was here every single day. She lived with us during a lockdown. She saw I thought, you know, we talked about patients every single day. But she's back to normal life. Everybody did.Will McInnes 18:45 I'd love to unpack or trace the steps of why we think people may have such an appetite for these mistruths and misinformation, and disinformation. At the moment, you mentioned one driver there with your sister, which is just there's just the understandable human desire for it to not be so that you mentioned also, you know, the kind of seeming connection between these deniers and weird books they have to promote or Bitcoin scams or whatever their particular shell, I think there's other stuff in the mix too. Because for the general population, including me, we found ourselves having to try and compute from what we could read and try and discern for ourselves like what the truth is, because there was a lack of consistent, authoritative, clear information. It felt it felt very fluid. And I feel like that's a driver to the greyness, of everything has left has left all kinds of people with all kinds of theories.Dr Dominic Pimenta 19:51 I think I'd 100% agree. So the basic I was talking about with the day so some public health colleagues and yeah, there's Two things that you can do in a public health, especially in a pandemic, where there's not really any treatment, I mean, the vaccine might come down the line in a few months. But there's not, there's nothing else you can do other than public behaviour. And the only way to influence is to maintain trust and have transparency. And at the beginning, you know, even in beginning of February, March, there seemed to be this political battle with, you know, Johnson giving a speech in Greenwich saying, we're going to be the Superman that's going to take off the glasses and champion free exchange, regardless of the medicine or whatever he said. And you know, even you know, privy to some of those discussions about when when lockdown should come in, and this is, you know, talking about herd immunity at the beginning of March. So that already, then there's some confusion, but then they started having the daily briefings and everything sort of coalesced. And there was this very strange moment where everybody in this very divided country seemed to be relatively on the same page for about five minutes. And actually, this I think, I think, the clapping some people found a bit corny, I personally was super cynical, I thought, I would think this is a load of crap. And then my sister was like, do you need to go outside the clapping for you the clapping for those that you know, it's happening for other health care workers, we should go outside at least and, and as soon as I heard it, I was super emotional, because it was that whole thing about about being on the same page everyone together. But you know, the, the actual reality of that was we had the daily briefings, we had witty and van Tam and all those superstars, talking every single day. And everybody was sort of understanding, you know, the basics. This is what the parent is, but then over a period of time, it started to get frayed. There was a lot of grandstanding, oh, it will be over by Christmas. And then we went into the coming thing. And that's exactly when they completely blew up all of that trust all of that transparency. And actually, at the time, I was like, because obviously, I didn't even know it. But famously, I resigned over this issue. And I said, you know, that why would they blow up this trust and transparency, when it's the only tool we have to prevent a second way, or the only is any trust, it's only you know, and if we, you know, create that vacuum, destroy that trust, create that grey space that you talked about? What will come in is going to be ineffective, and we will have a lot more deaths. And that's exactly what happened, sadly. But the but yeah, even at the time, I was like, well, there must he must, you know, there must be something there must be some grand plan for government, there must be some super kompromat that he's got on the whole cabinet. I don't know. But it's got to be good. Because this is all for how much political capital Have you burned for this? How much lives are going to be lost as a consequence? And then he just walked, like, he just walked like 10, like five months afterwards? Because he had a spat with whatever else, you know, Lee cane or whatever. Anyway, I completely digress. But I think you were pointing exactly right. That it is that clear, consistent messaging. And actually, if you look around the world, the countries that have done the best have just been clear and consistent, like Angela Merkel, will, you know, every time she opens her mouth about COVID, it's clear, it's concise. It's on message, it rarely changes. And actually, it's really useful. I was sharing clips from her in German subtitles a look at this, this is probably the best thing I've heard about COVID in months, because it was just so straightforward. There was no this like, flip flopping on mosque flip flopping on whatever else is, and actually, you know, Sweden. Everybody wants to think all Sweden's the best. Actually, Sweden is now having some of the worst tests in the world again, and already had it whereas Norway and Finland comparatively have done completely much, much better, no deaths, and actually no second wave this time around because people actually trust the process. But the one thing that they were really good at was that everybody believed in Anders technical and he would give very good clarifies, he said, this is the strategy. This is what we're doing. This is why you should all stick to it. And what we have done is like completely abandoned that we have almost like government or public health policy by headline, you know, people hearing about the lockdown. And it's I think it's, it's doubling and effective. The first thing is that it comes in a headline. So I was like, Well, why am I hearing about this in the sun? Why haven't someone officially got on the podium and told me, but the second thing is people feel very disregarded. They feel like this is their secondary, you know, they pick up the paper and find out that their house is locked down now. They feel like they're not engaged. They're not part of this process. And it's the countries that have made their citizens part of the processWill McInnes 24:36 that have done that. Look at Vietnam. Yeah, Vietnam is going to Vietnam one feels is going to be one of those countries that is is the case study. In hindsight. What I'd love to do is is propel from this assessment of how it happened to the amazing point that you made about how you've experienced fellow medics fellow professionals, though who have been brought through the sort of rigour of the scientific school who are also doubting the reality of COVID? As you would see it, what do you make of that? Because we can't sort of explain that away as quite in the same way. It's not, it's not as dismissible, or as forgivable, maybe. Or, like, what, how on earth can fellow medics be unclear about covid?Dr Dominic Pimenta 25:29 Because they're human. And you see, I mean, it's not even fellow medics, right. You've got seen a senior epidemiol infectious diseases, epidemiologist, professors of evidence based medicine. I mean, I'm not sure what that means. But whatever. But you know, and these are people that are not nothing. And it's hard to know, sometimes if there is an agenda. For some, for some academics, I think they have literally just planted their flag in this in, in in the, in a hill. And that's the hill that choosing to die on. And it's not about anything else other than proving the point. I suppose the problem is that, and I think medics especially, I mean, I know obviously, I've compiled community of medics, just human beings. I remember a great conversation I actually have, which still illustrates this idea to me, right, right. About a week, week, 10 days before we lock down. I was sitting in the office with a colleague of mine. And I said to him, oh, you know, how, you know, do you think your research is, is going to be cancelled? And he's Oh, no, I'm going to go fly off to wherever it was Amsterdam or something, and all my research is ready to go. And it's like, for about COVID. Like, in two weeks time, we're going to be in it or whatever. Like, we're going to be inundated. And he's like, Oh, well, you know, I don't think that's gonna happen, really. And I was like, but look at the numbers like the web, you know, this week. Look at them. Look at somebody right now. Like it's boiling over when we're two weeks behind. He's like, yeah, I've seen all that. And I was like, okay, what's the connector? And then he and then I said to him, so so what do you still think that this is going to be fine? And he's like, Yeah, no, I accept that. It's gonna be bad. But I just think I'm going to still go to reset. And that's it. But why it is that Well, I suppose is a combination of optimism and naivety. I really think that illustrate that, that everybody wanted to not this not be the case. Right? And I still think that's true. And I still people want to not not be in this world.Will McInnes 27:27 Absolutely. Have you come across the Stockdale paradox? No. So I think he may have ended up as an admiral or something. But he was a fighter pilot for the USA, flying over Vietnam was shot down, taken to a prisoner of war camp and held there for a really long time. And what he famously the phrase that he coined was the the optimists die first. And it was that all the people who thought they would be out at Christmas, which suffer a real kind of blow to their morale, they then say, we'll be out by Easter, they then say, maybe, if so and so becomes president, or if this accord is reached, and bit by bit, they were, they set themselves up to be destroyed. Whereas his his view, which seems, you know, pretty negative, or pessimistic or whatever was, you know, we're not getting out quickly. We, we might as well dig in for the long run. And at least I guess your example is, they were self aware enough to know that they were being hopelessly optimistic. But there is definitely optimism has been tested. I mean, wow, what a year 2020? Like, if there was a year to test anyone'sDr Dominic Pimenta 28:42 Yeah, well, resilience wise, I think, is a really good point. Because actually, you know, why, you know, you say why on why could medics, you know, not see the science or something. And I think fundamentally, what I've genuinely realised maybe even in the course of this year,Unknown Speaker 28:59 even this, thisDr Dominic Pimenta 29:00 idea of cognitive dissonance, that human beings, I actually think that's the normal state for human and actually, I think, in my everyday life, I am so inconsistent, and I think everybody is, and I don't think that people would end up one of the biggest problems is people, you know, these professors is very good example. They stake their, you know, they stake their flag, and that's the hill they want to die on. But we did it in our everyday lives all the time. You know, we say, I don't know, I'm a, I'm a frugal person or I not you know, I'm an angry person, that Bina you tell yourself that this is who you are. And then you just, it's the opposite, you start to behave to justify a Brexit is this great example, once the decisions be made, it's much harder to convince people of despite, you know, complete self immolation of some of the mean. And but I actually fundamentally think we, I think, give ourselves too much credit in a way or maybe put too much pressure on ourselves to be consistent. And individuals when I actually think human beings are just messy, and not at all like that, I couldn'tWill McInnes 30:05 agree more. I mean, the Kahneman Thinking Fast and thinking slow and effect, effectively my takeaway from the book, which I didn't finish, and I don't think lots of people do, but was that there's a, there's a, we think the brain is telling us what to do when actually, the brain is inventing a narrative for what we've just done. And that that, for me was brilliant, because because in business, which is more my domain, some of the people who've proclaimed themselves to be the most rational, in my experience are the most irritatingly irrational. And, and but they're wedded to this identity, like you say they've chosen the hill. And that gets in the way. So the project that you've now started, you got interested in misinformation around COVID. And being the go getter, that you are the person who then finds extra time and resource on top of already a busy life, you've, you've started to do something about it, can you pick up that story and tell us like, where you started? And where you're going? Actually, IDr Dominic Pimenta 31:12 think it goes a bit further back. So for a number of years, and this is why, you know, maybe my political hat. So when I first started working, I worked in a really terrible hospital. And I just couldn't work out why somebody in a perfect, you know, health secretary in or civil service, would make all these decisions that were so obviously detrimental, you know, on the ground, like the pay cuts, but also a local hospital close when we was my first year of medicine. And suddenly, RNA was completely flooded, and we couldn't cope. And I said, Well, how did this happen, and every struggle is just what happens, as I but that's, you know, and then and but this is constantly trying to explain that to people who didn't really understand the realities. And this is a concept of medicine of informed consent, right? This is the bedrock. So you cannot say yes to a procedure or whatever it might be even as simple as an injection of x and vaccination. Without understanding the risks and the benefits and, and kind of my role, I think, in my public facing sort of Twitter, whatever it is, for the last five years, has been trying to explain just like the, you know, the fundamentals, like what's going on with NHS? Why does it need more money. This is why you know, your vote is important, because this is what will happen. And in regards to the deficit, and to the NHS, nurses, etc, etc. And what really struck me Actually, especially, you know, over the Brexit time, and over the last couple of years, is how different discourses now, and actually wrote this whole, this whole essay, which nobody read about how this base bit is based. It's basically an update from my point of view of this, but if you read the book called The Shallows was on my shelf and recommended someone, basically, this guy wrote it in 2008, Nick Carr, in 2010. And it was in the New York Times bestseller list. And it's all about how the internet, and even the very basic functions of the internet is a great example of where it talks about hyperlinks, but it also talks about how they distract, and then actually start to rewire your brain. So a lot of people don't know this, but your brain is super plastic, like it can make connections depending on what you do on a day to day basis, like physical connections, and is a phrase in neuroscience called neurons that fire together wire together. So basically, your behaviour actually determines your biology, which is the first point. So the problem is if we start filling our brains with super distracting, you know, attention grabbing constant content. And this was in 2010, when basically the internet there was no social media, really, there wasn't much in the way of people being on Facebook, there's not a lot of video content. But he talks about this great example, that actually, when people invented the internet, they thought that connectivity would be much better for our brains. This is greatexperiment, where they showed hyperlinks, right? And you know, the, the basic block of internet 1.0, whatever it was, and they said, here's an article or something hasn't gone reform or something. Here's a pro and here's a anti article. And here's what I wanted, one group just had to read one in the meet the other. And the other group had hyperlinks all the way through both articles, so they could click back and forth. And they hypothesise that this would be in great synergy and they comprehend much better. And actually, the what actually happened was the group that just read one plain article and then read the other one had much better comprehension of the subject than the people had flipped between them. And they actually what they hypothesised The cause was was this concept of macro distraction. So you actually, you know, the idea that you can only hold like five or seven items in your brain at one time. Well, if you're reading a piece of text, and you come along a blue underlined word that you think is a hyperlink, what are the mechanics in your brain that actually tells you that is a hyperlink and then your decision making to click on it or not? Well, you have to see it's blue. See, it's unlocked. You have to understand what it is, you have to then make a decision whether or not you want to pull yourself away from here and go back or come back. And actually all of that micro distraction completely shreds your ability to retain what you were just reading. And now imagine the internet, right? Like when you that video that doesn't go away. And when you scroll down the page, and it takes a long to load. And you know, some pages are so complex now that every time I go on The Daily Mail website, and now I've had to put that in writing that I sometimes do my in my actual laptop overheats. I don't know what it is. There's something running in the background that's so intense anyway. So I've always been about misinformation. And there's loads of evidence that smartphone use causes depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, suicides, suicide is up massively, especially in young people over the last 10 years. And one of the big drivers people think is this social wired world that we live in. And the caveat to that, and I think nobody really saw this coming is having access to all of the knowledge of humankind at your fingertips has all that meant is people are less informed, because they're overwhelmed. There's like white noise, you can't even stop for five minutes to comprehend anything. Because there's 15 people giving their opinion about it another 15 sharing something else about it. And I just it completely destroyed. Actually, it was interesting, I just watched the social dilemma on Netflix a few months ago. And it really sort of encapsulated this, but it's the same point. And essentially, you cannot have a society or democracy or any of the norms, you know, and then back to informed consent. How can we make informed decisions as a society, when we don't even agree on what reality actually is like when we think we're informed. And that's the irony, it's not that we're uninformed. We're not like, Oh, I don't know pick anything. And that's not that's not what happened. people now have very strong opinions about everything. And they have to, because that is the nature of social media. If you see something, you have to like it, or comment or share it or not. So it forces you to have decisions. And I actually think this is one of my wacky ideas. But great, great to like have a button that just says I don't know about this, I don't, or I have no opinion about it, or I don't care about it. And not just to feed the algorithm, but just to tell people that it's okay to not actually be, you know, completely on top of this subject and have anyway. So, we need we need from Brexit, that this world has really started to verge and people live in their bubbles, and all of the social media algorithms completely embed you in the bubbles. And actually what's really interesting about the COVID world and as I was on a panel actually a few months ago with the World Health, world public health Congress, and on the panel was Carol Cadwallader. And they asked us the same question about misinformation. And she, I mean, she was of the opinion, she's been studying this for years that lots of these networks are now focused on COVID and utilising it in a very deliberate way. And actually, I'm starting to think that these networks have become organic. The algorithm itself, trains you to be outraged. And initially, you might be outraged about a particular subject, whether it's vaccines, or Brexit, or Republican or Democrat, or whatever it might be. And then that sort of funnels, you know, like one of those balls that sort of bounces down and ends up in a pocket, and then you're in this outrage pocket, and you're ready, all your responses already trained to be to be outraged, or whatever. And I think what happened with COVID is COVID came along. And that bubble just got attached to a new source of information. And then you would see people sharing outrage, but about COVID. And then they're in the same bubble, the same group that you are, and then you just gravitate towards them. And then all that's happened is you just sort of migrate different topics, same anger, and the same sort of lack of, you know, shared information and resources. And we have seen this and this is fascinating. So if you there's a study recently looking in America at Google Trends, right, so it's just what people are searching for. And if you saw this is super interesting. So when COVID was announced, you could look on Google and by state depending if you voted Democrat or Republican, in democrat states, they will searching for hand sanitizer, and searches for hand sanitizer republican states was statistically much lower. Now, there is no earthly reason for that, like doesn't make any sense. COVID is not a political issue. Everybody wants to live like there's no, and I actually almost don't think, you know, unless you're extreme bad actor, and you're trying to like sink another country, but at the same time trying to preserve your own country. I don't think there may be some truth to that. But there was almost no human intent why people would want to mess with that. Like, it doesn't really make sense. Other than the algorithms naturally push you in these directions. And it got me thinking like, how, how do we sort of interrupt that? And there's a few things like the first thing I started doing was actually just saying actually, a lot of the you know, these Ivor Cummins characters to do science heritage, they're actually very good at presentation and we sort of named this a long time in medicine because if you people look at you know, the people are very ready to dismiss. homoeopathy is like quacks and natural path. But we have to take a step back as a profession and say, Well, hold on, why are they successful? Because it's, you know, it sure is s**t isn't the fact that doesn't work, it doesn't work. And we all know it doesn't work. And you have horror stories time and time and time again of the man with cancer going to the homoeopath, you know, the man with terminal disease. So why don't these horror stories put people up, and it's because of their presentation, you know, you go and see a homoeopath, they spend 60 minutes with you, you know, you're paying for it, but they spent 60 minutes with you, they talk to you about all your problems, they want to know you in the round, they want to know about your family. And actually, we could learn a lot from that we could learn a lot that actually a lot of medicine, you know, a lot of the ways that we practice in our very hectic modern medical world isn't doesn't suit the patient at all, you know that 50% of patients don't take their medicines 50%. So essentially, if you're sitting there adopting, you either do pretty good job today, probably save 75 to 80%. Now you didn't, half your patients are not even going to take the tablet, so you give to them. So you've done nothing for them. So this idea that you know, the presentation form. So we started doing this thing where we just I just emulator but I basically just went to a video and just talk through it. And actually, I found that cut through in a different way. Because people are so used to like live comments on tweets, the condensed form that can without context is useless. And then I took another step, I've got even angrier because I think I saw something else about think about herd immunity actually, about being a real strategy for the winter. This was in September. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://hererightnow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">hererightnow.substack.com</a>

11 total episodes available

Deep-dive analytics for Here Right Now

Frequently asked questions

Have a different question and can't find the answer you're looking for? Reach out to our support team by sending us an email and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

What is Here Right Now?: Here Right Now explores the future that’s already here. Every week a special guest brings a new perspective on how a facet of everyday life is changing right now. Through their expert eyes we go deep into emerging new trends around the world. <a href="https://hererightnow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">hererightnow.substack.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

Legal Disclaimer

Pod Engine is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially connected with any of the podcasts displayed on this platform. We operate independently as a podcast discovery and analytics service.

All podcast artwork, thumbnails, and content displayed on this page are the property of their respective owners and are protected by applicable copyright laws. This includes, but is not limited to, podcast cover art, episode artwork, show descriptions, episode titles, transcripts, audio snippets, and any other content originating from the podcast creators or their licensors.

We display this content under fair use principles and/or implied license for the purpose of podcast discovery, information, and commentary. We make no claim of ownership over any podcast content, artwork, or related materials shown on this platform. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names are the property of their respective owners.

While we strive to ensure all content usage is properly authorized, if you are a rights holder and believe your content is being used inappropriately or without proper authorization, please contact us immediately at hey@podengine.ai for prompt review and appropriate action, which may include content removal or proper attribution.

By accessing and using this platform, you acknowledge and agree to respect all applicable copyright laws and intellectual property rights of content owners. Any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or commercial use of the content displayed on this platform is strictly prohibited.