Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It

Speaker 1 Hey there. Editing Nick here at the corner of a busy airport. On Friday, July 31, we hosted doctor Ginny Survitniklos for a q and a about her book, Pedagogies of Collapse, A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It. This was the conclusion of our Pedagogies Collapse book club where we met biweekly to discuss the book and its implications for education. I wanted to give you a heads up that this conversation gets heavy pretty quickly, includes explicit language, and remind you that HRP is a nonpartisan five zero one c three, and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement. And if that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what will. Enjoy the episode. Thinking back at where we've come from and what we've discussed, you know, don't think anybody who signed up was ever in denial. But I do think that over the course of our three meetups this summer, the Pedagogies of Collapse book club has gone through the stages of grief. We started the conversation in June feeling overwhelmed, angry, heartbroken, combative, and even curious. You all expressed the need for a new language, for talking about the climate crisis with young folks so that there's room for hope, imagination, and joy. You wondered what your role is in all of this, and you shared the struggles in your own context. Districts putting NAEP scores over the impact of lead in the water or air quality concerns from wildfire smoke. Or the start of the school year delayed for schools that have never really needed air conditioning before. We felt deeply schools' relationship to collapse not just as a casualty of collapse, but as reproducers of it. The lack of imagination around what schools can be is so frustrating. Why don't students know the plants and animals in their own neighborhoods? What does it teach us that the trash can just be dropped anywhere and someone unseen whisks it away? And we weighed the cost of being the person to act first. I'm not sure anyone in this room needs to be convinced, even if some of the talking points might help our colleagues move towards the cause. But when I asked on day one what we wanted to build over the course of our conversations, you said real concrete ideas, not the ones corporations make us believe are our responsibility. Because even if collapse is global, that hopeful action will be local. And I'm grateful for those of you who are able to join us this summer, and I'm so grateful to be joined today by the author of Pedagogies of A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It, doctor Ginny Servit Miklos. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Speaker 2 Hi. Greetings from The Netherlands.

Speaker 1 Lovely. I can see the sun shining in through the window. It must be a great day over there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But we haven't had rain since, well, at least two months.

Speaker 1 Two months? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, like, everything is parched golden brown, which is not normal for Holland. No. Like, it was 36 degrees centigrade on Wednesday for the third time this year.

Speaker 1 I I was one of the things I was just reading about as I was, I don't know, information gathering for some of the climate events connected, you know, to our book talks is that this is on record, like, the hottest June, the hottest summer, Europe has apparently ever in recorded history experienced. And I was reading about those wildfires in Spain and France. I posted some links in our Discord about that. And I understand, Jeanine, that you have family in France. I hope they're doing okay. Have they been impacted by the wildfires at all? Yeah. So I'm French, and my family lives in Fontainebleau.

Speaker 2 Okay. My parents actually their house is in the forest, and 10% of the forest burned down two weeks ago. Oh, for they first time ever. Yeah. I mean, they're okay, but it's only a matter of time before the trees are all sick from the droughts year after year after year, so they're not very resilient. It's only a matter of time.

Speaker 1 Oh my goodness. Yeah. Well, I I mean, I hope they're doing okay now and and into the future. One of the things, you know, I think moving into our conversation about the book was the context of you writing it. You know, the summer of twenty twenty four, I recall, as being particularly vicious in Europe as well, and Pedagogies of Collapse was released, I think, in November later that year. But I wrote it in '22 and '23, cause it takes a while for February to get things published. But already '23

Speaker 2 was, like, unprecedented drought. And we're at the start of the El Nino, so next year is guaranteed to be warmer than this year. Guaranteed. It's like almost a 100% certain.

Speaker 1 Well, that I mean, I don't even know how to respond to, you know, at at this point, just like an acceptance. One of the things I did wanna talk about and maybe help situate the conversation is like those changes since whenever you submitted the draft to the publisher there. Like, how has the book and its provocations been received? What directions has the book taken you since its publication?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Oh gosh. I've been very, very, very busy since the book came out. Well, I guess globally, I had underestimated the speed at which geopolitical collapse could occur. So I didn't mention geopolitical collapse in the book, but I think I I underestimated how virulently America would pour its energy into dismantling the very system they built after 1945. My prediction currently is that within thirty years, there will be one large superpower left, China, which is the going to be the only country capable of having a large centralized government. It will it's already I mean, I've been through my work in Africa, I've seen this for myself. They are building, like, giant octopus tentacles all the way to the key resources they need to power their future. So lithium mines, all the rare earths and minerals, and all the resources they need there. And they're doing it through these kinds of shake hands with the devil deals with African elites. You know, they're building just enough roads and just enough Internet and just enough airports for the local population to be okay with it, but it comes with terms and conditions. And, like, the Zambians are never gonna be able to repay some of those loans. It's just yeah. But China will be the last country standing in terms of, like, superpowers, and the rest I mean, the book I'm working on now, which I have to finish writing before the end of the year, is called The Left We Need, Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, and Climate Justice for All. So that's my new book. And I've been, like, really looking at two things that I hadn't looked at in Pedagogies of Collapse. One is the AI, and I've got, like, a whole section called Will AI Kill Us All? And my answer is yes, but not for the reasons you think. It's not Okay. A Terminator thing. And inequality is the second one that I hadn't looked at enough as a vector of collapse.

Speaker 1 Okay. Really an emphasis on those geopolitical factors at play. Can I ask what is your take on the the way that AI will kill us? I just wanna get a sneak peek of Yeah. So I can see it coming, you know? There's two main reasons AI will kill us. The first is that all the I had this conversation with my friend Zach Stein,

Speaker 2 and we were, like, talking back and forth, and and I was like, Zach, you know, like, I think if it comes to feeding people or feeding the robots, they'll definitely starve the people and feed the robots. And he was like, yeah. Totally. Like, totally. They're totally gonna starve people. And if it comes to choosing between cooling people or cooling the robots, they're totally gonna cool the robots and then the people die, you know, in these mass heat death events. And so it's, one, gonna be a resource problem because AI I mean, people have this, like, as I wrote in the book, you know, like phallic technomagic. This, like, technomagic thinking. But AI is silicon based stuff and and chips and lots and lots of water and electricity galore and all things that are very, very material. And, I mean, here in Europe I don't know how it is in The US, but here in Europe, the grid is already completely buggered. Like, you cannot add any more, plug anything more into the grid. It's not a question of generating more electricity. It's literally there's not enough cables to carry it around. And so people are massively actually buying, like, solar batteries. My solar battery is arriving in, like, a couple weeks because, like, the grid cannot handle the amount of electricity that's going through it. And so these these, like, data centers are literally building up, firing up coal power plants, gas power plants. But the thing is so so that's, like, the resource side of things is gonna create more droughts. It's gonna create more demand for electricity at a time where we desperately need to electrify everything. It's going to have all these it has all these, like, bottlenecks built in. And China is sitting pretty on I read, like, I literally read through the entire International Energy Agency report on AI, and China is sitting on, like, 80% of the materials that you need to build AI. They have a monopoly on that. So what I foresee is that in the future, China will be the only state standing, and then you're gonna have, like, these the American billionaires plan is to secede from The US and to create these, like, prosperity type corporate city Randian fever dream. And they will be vassal states to China because they don't have any of their own materials or things to build the AI with, so they're gonna be, like, vassal states to China. So, like, China will invade Taiwan. That will happen. They're just waiting for The US to, like, disappear, which The US will do. I mean, I don't even know if The US will make it to the end of the second Trump presidency. But, like, China's just China's got time. They don't have elections coming up, so they've got time. They can they can, like, afford to wait out The US collapsing on its own, just like The US waited out the Soviet Union collapsing on its own. And these like, Zuckerberg and Musk and Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, their their planet is to have, like, their own they're planning to basically not need people. So the problem with AI, of course, is if you replace all the workers with robots, who's gonna buy the stuff that you're producing? So in terms of economics, it it's, like, it doesn't make sense. So it's like a hyper concentration of wealth, and I'm so tired of hearing these tech bros going like, oh, an age of abundance for all. And I'm like, yeah, because you guys are so keen to share all your all your wealth. You know? Like, all that wealth hoarding. You guys are gonna vote yourselves for being taxed into a universal basic income. I don't think so. And so the inequality being the second problem. But they know this. Like, the billionaires know this. But, basically, I wrote at the time that I finished the book, think the richest person was still Jeff Bezos, and his fortune was about I don't something like 150,000,000,000 or 200,000,000,000 or something like that. And now Elon Musk at 1,000,000,000,000. Like, we cannot even fathom how much money. It's just your brain cannot compute. I think Gary Stevenson said it best. Like, one million seconds is a week and a half. One billion seconds is something like two years or something or three years, and a trillion seconds is thirty three thousand years. So that gives you an idea of the order of magnitude. So, basically, the billionaires will have everything. Everyone else will have nothing. The resources we need to survive, like food, water, land, etcetera, will be burnt to a crisp. China will have everything that's left. We'll be left to fight over the scraps while the billionaires build their, fortress AI powered, and and basically will only let in people if you could read Octavia Butler if you wanna see what that looks like, but it's like they'll let in their misuse and their yoga pilates teacher and whatever. But all the rest, their food production, they intend to fully automate that in, like, controlled conditions by gathering all the energy to themselves. They fully intend to leave us all to die. And I don't think that that's, like they're delusional, of course. And I think the reason that they are able to abide such delusions is that they're high as fuck on drugs. I'm sorry. I'm, like I think that ketamine is a big part of how we got here.

Speaker 1 That should be the real title of the book right there. I think ketamine is a big part of how we got here. Well, I I gotta say, that that doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence just being being that nobody in this room, as far as I'm aware, lives in China currently, which means that your prediction, you know, is is like of a dramatically degraded future, you know, both materially, politically, socially, you know, for the rest of yeah. For the for for the rest of us. I'm wondering one of the questions I I wanted to to ask you in here is and I think this is a great time to do it is like, I think there's a core of people who sort of are on board with raising this alarm. Right? And just being like, hey. Here are the facts and the data. And if the trends proceed as they are, this is this is one of those potential futures. Right? How do we balance? This was something we wrestled with in the book club. How do we balance truthfulness? Right? Like, just laying it out there. Like Octavia Butler in, you know, the Earthseed books, How do we take those trends, extrapolate them with the truthfulness without on the other hand perpetuating some kind of doomerism? Like, what is where where is the line here? Like, are we all screwed and we don't have a say? Or is it like, you know, close our laptops and go sit in the corner and cry? Like, how do we how do we navigate from here towards that potential future?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So that's always a very difficult one. And I don't want to pedal false hope. So you have to start from where things are at and meet people where they're at and go what's still possible from here. Because, like, if you're just gonna ask, oh, yeah. We don't wanna be too negative, so let's imagine a future that's actually not possible. I mean, France will burn to a crisp. That's my home country, and, like, all the forests will be gone. When I see what's happening now, like, it's the whole the harvests are failing. The forests are burning. People are cooking inside their homes. We have no access to natural resources anymore in Europe. We use them all up, so we have no steel, no coal, no like, we don't have anything left. We don't have, you know, all we don't have our own nuclear fuels. We don't we don't have anything. So the day that the powers that be choose to no longer let us import stuff, which will happen, Europe will be like, I honestly think that Spain, Italy, the Southern part of France, Greece will all be Mad Max type deserts within thirty, forty years. How fast it's going? It's like it seems unthinkable, but then did you foresee COVID? Did you think that would be possible that we'd shut down the whole world? I mean, people are are staring at these fires and going, oh, how is this possible? And then, you know, there's, like, prominent French scientists like Jean Marc Jean Covisi is like, told you so. Like, we told you this would happen. You could have prepared. You chose not to. So, I mean, Holland will be underwater. No matter how much hubris the Dutch have about how good they are with water, we're gonna have to move up north for sure, like us us Europeans. But also new Americans, like, of The US will be uninhabitable, so you guys will have to to move up north as well. Let's see how Canada feels about you guys then. But, yeah, it's it's not a joyful message to share, but that's why like, that's what we have to live with. Right? Like, did did did my grandmother want to live through World War two and have Germans literally living in her house and have rationing for fifteen years or however long it was, because still our rationing lasted way longer after the war, by the way, for those who are not from Europe. Like, we had famines after the war, like, in '45, forty six, twenty thousand people died in The Netherlands from starvation after the Second World War, after the end of the hostilities because there was no food. So, you know, are we in for some rough times? Yes. And we can prepare for it or not. And what I dedicate myself to now, what I've done since I wrote the book, is, of course, I founded the Bilden Climate School in The Netherlands, which is the first school in The Netherlands to combine vocational applied and university education. So I guess you guys would maybe call it community college and university combined. Okay. Like, the it's like a trade school. So, you know, we've got students who are, like, tailor students, so they learn literally work with fabrics and sewing. We've got event management students, doctor's assistant students, like, sport teacher training students. Those are the vocational students. We have, like, supply chain management students. We have, security studies students. They're not university security studies, but, like, literally learning to be security and health and safety inspectors. And then we have the university students from psychology, economics, the the usual, business, liberal arts, and we mix them all together. And we work with a bunch of local circular companies with whom we've built these relationships. Like, they're all companies that do really interesting stuff. Like, we've got a company that transforms used up coffee grounds from cafes in Rotterdam into mushrooms. So, like, lion's mane and so officially, they produce lion's mane and oyster mushrooms. That's the ones. Of course, in The Netherlands, you can also grow other kinds of mushrooms, but we won't get into that. There's a company that recycles fire hoses and turns them into, like, leather pieces, bags, big belts, type stuff. We've got a company that is, like, a diving center for ocean protection. We've got then we've got, like, a dozen of these companies, and the students go in mixed groups and work on, like, a real challenge, and then they have to turn that into a community education program and a fashion piece for a show. And we just had our fashion show two weeks ago. It was absolutely wonderful. 500 people came. It was it was, like, incredible. Because, like, the core message that I have for the left right now and for progressives who are in despair is, like, if your message is everything is screwed and you should also feel terribly guilty about being white and about, like, your role and complicity in in the system, yeah, well, good luck with what are you gonna do with that? And that was my problem with, like, sort of the extinction rebellion type tactics. Like, why are you stopping commuters from going to work? The these are the wrong target. The class war is between us and the billionaires. You should be sending drones to destroy data centers, not stopping commuters who were taking a c o two free form of transport from getting to work. You know what I mean? Like, I come from a a working class family, and that's really what I've tried to tap into. I'm the only environmental program as far as I know that is able to attract, you know, like, Muslim kids from the suburbs of Rotterdam. Girls in hijabs come to my school alongside people with queer flags. And, you know, like, we are able to build these imperfect solidarities and just say, everybody get along because we're doing something and not just sitting around navel gazing and saying who has the best words to describe decoloniality, intersectionality, and god knows what. Like, my work I think a lot of students, if you mention decoloniality, they'll just, like, roll their eyes at you and take their phone out. And I love that because it keeps us real. It's like, you know, get off your PhD high horse people. Like, seriously, Learn to talk like normal people. I mean, I give workshops to dock workers here in in the harbor in Rotterdam. So I was asked by a company to give a workshop on power, and I I did it with the blue collars and with the white collars, and I had way more fun with the blue collar dock workers than I did with the, I'm so smart. I have a master's degree, you know, white collars up at the headquarters. Because there were blue collar workers who were all, you know, from Turkish background, Eastern European background, Moroccan backgrounds, a lot of our blue collar class years from, like, those kinds of backgrounds. And I myself married a Eastern European working class clan, so I know a lot about those, you know, like, that kind of background. And they were really like, when you don't talk down at them, when you really sit down and have, like, a a real conflict, yeah, what what is actually power? Like, what is this thing? And one guy was like, does my wife have power over me? I mean, is this, like, a really funny conversation? And and that's really what I try to do, to really not talk down at people, but really also with realness, just like with with realness about my own struggles and me and this guy from this this organization that we work with. So we're located in a community center in Fjallnaud, which is the poorest district of the whole of Rotterdam. Rotterdam being the most socioeconomically unequal district, like, city in the whole of The Netherlands. You've got the rich North and the poor South, basically, and it's literally divided by a river. And the climate school is in the South, and that's where it's heavily immigrant, sort of Moroccan Turkish neighborhoods. It's really twenty year, like, life expectancy difference between the North and the South. And we are in this community building that is completely not climate proof that we're gonna try and figure out ways to, like, strap fabric to it so the sun reflects off the roof or something like that because it's unlivable, from, like, mid June until September. But we share this building with, lovely community organizations, and, you know, there's, like, Turkish flute lessons after we finish class there. There's also a a a special is, like, a nonprofit for people with a special needs education. And they have a whole program for boys, especially for kids from the street in Rotterdam to get them into, like, learn a profession, to learn to do something, to not hang out and do drugs. There's a huge I mean, The Netherlands is a narco state. We have a huge cocaine problem. We have a huge, like, heroin. But it's mainly cocaine and and DMA, and I think I'm, like, I'm not not an expert on this. But, I mean, through the Port of Rotterdam, it just they use the shady so The Netherlands had the worst way of legalizing weed ever that still allowed these shady cartels to come from Morocco, and they used the same channels to import cocaine. And so it's just, like, a really easy way out for the kids from Rotterdam South. And just like me sitting down with the director of this organization, and he did time for dealing drugs and for, like, organizing cocaine traffic through Rotterdam. So he was out of jail, and he is now working to prevent youth from following in his footsteps. And he and I are just, like, having a a drink, obviously, not a beer because they're Muslim, but having a drink in the sunshine, you know, just talking about our lives and talk about some of the the things I've done in my life and some of the things I'm less proud of. And, you know, I also had my own issues with drugs. And so just on, like, on a real human to human level. And then one of my companies, like, bailed on us. Like, the guy was like, yeah. Sorry. You guys are bad for business. I need to bail on you and, like, dump my students in it. And then I just pick up the phone. I'm like, hey. Call this guy up. I'm like, hey. Can you take my students? And he was just like, yes. And just kind of rescued our project because of these human relationships that we've been building. And for me, that's just so important that even if I fail, even if the school doesn't make any kind of difference, even if we, you know, lose and Rotterdam's underwater, that at least throughout this whole time, we've had a lot of fun. That was a long winded way of answering, but

Speaker 1 You know what? It it was such a good response, so thorough response. I kind of forgot the what what even had provoked it. But it got me thinking, like, you're you're referring to those imperfect solidarities. That was a a big thing that we had talked about in the course of our book club. But I think I kind of answered a question in my head that I wanted to ask you, which was, like, how do we, given you know, if there's gonna be this this breaking point. Right? This this point of collapse, maybe it's kind of slow and then all at once, or maybe there is another just kind of global event like COVID pandemic or something that impacts everybody everywhere. There's going to be groups because they're already there. The nationalists, fascists, that are gonna take advantage of this. Like, we might call them ecofascists, right, who are going to use that collapse as a way to crack down on immigration even greater than they had before or even just argue for some kind of eugenic depopulation. Right? Climate disaster and all these things as a way, you know, to weed out the survival of the fittest sort of mindset. But what I'm hearing you saying is that this is a way that maybe we can rescue, you know, some people who might otherwise be in that eco fascist coalition into, I don't know, a a different group without, I don't know, sort of both ecocidal and suicidal societal ideas. But, like, that need for large, diverse, and interdisciplinary groups who were going to not necessarily be the savior of everyone, but, like, we're gonna, at least make this thing that we're in, whatever you wanna call it, we're gonna make this enjoyable and livable and survivable. Is that sort of what you're you're pointing to there?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So I think that there's a very clear pipeline from the despair of working classes that having been abandoned by the left to Donald Trump and to fascism. And, like Right. Fascism has always fed into working class despair. Always. There's just so in preparing my book, you know, I spent a lot of time reading on the history of the left and looked at how the left completely abandoned the working classes in the '19 late eighties, nineties, Clinton, Tony Blair, you know, Schroeder, Mitterrand. Like, all those people were professional politicians, career politicians, none of them hailing from the working class who basically sold their parties to big business and to billionaire donors. And there was no rescuing the left from that afterwards. And that's when the left split into three. You had the economic left, the working class people who were completely abandoned, and they were hoovered up by these, like, simplistic narratives about why their living standards are falling and why their identity was pulled apart. Then you have the political left or parliamentary left, which became this, you know, like, professional class. Not so different from the right wing political parties, actually. They're taking money from the same people. They're not moving the lead needle much one way or another. Don't expect anything from the parliamentary left, like, as they said. Don't expect anything from the Democrats, honestly. It's it's it's just flabbergasting to me to see how it's been, like, what, a year and a half? And it's it's still have almost two years. The midterms are coming up. It's like, what's your plan, guys? Oh, you don't have one. Okay. Great.

Speaker 1 Of all of the things that I don't need to be reminded of, that's it. That's the thing in the immediate future that makes me most depressed, I guess. And it's like, Kyr Stalmer won a landslide election in The UK and managed to fuck it up so thoroughly in under a year. It's like, dude,

Speaker 2 you had one job. To go fuck it up. You managed to fuck it up. Like, hell. And yet yeah. And yet

Speaker 1 oh, well, that's that's wonderful.

Speaker 2 And then there's the intellectual left, which is us, and we fucked it up. And until we admit that we became prissy little intellectuals who didn't care about communicating beyond the walls of the university, who thought it was cool to speak in tongues, and who got, like, a sadomasochistic enjoyment out of who's the most guilty and the most complicit, then and I know because, like, I'm doing a lot of research into BDSM for my new book. So I I see y'all. I recognize these patterns. This is BDSM stuff one zero one. I mean, I said it was in Pedagogy of the Collapse, I said it was, like, religious cult type behavior, but I think it appeals to the need for sadomasochism. The more I do research on BDSM communities, the more I see that it's a fundamental human thing. But, like, we took this really far with the whole, you know, all white people are complicit and everyone's a racist. Because if everyone's a racist, then it doesn't matter whether you're Donald Trump or whether you're a professor who used the wrong word. It's all the same, and then nothing makes sense anymore. And if everyone's a fascist, then you can't call out fascism anymore, and your words don't mean anything anymore. And I just got so fed up of this, like, pissing contest for who was able to use the more complicated words to express their solidarity with Palestine and and trans rights. And it's like, okay, well, I sat between an extinction extinction rebellion meetup that a working class bar owner had kindly offered to host for free because he believed in, you know, like, climate justice. And they're all doing their introduction, and they're all doing, like, let's do all our pronouns now. And this guy's completely confused. He's like, we do what? With a with a what? And everybody's like, aren't she, her? And they're all going around. This guy is like, he's getting more beet root red by the second because he has no idea what's going on. And by the time it gets to him, he's like and the woman next to is, like, healthily, and you are? He, him? And he's like, what? And yeah. When you shame someone and there was this massive, like, sadistic urge to shame and cancel anyone who wasn't buying into our agenda, they turn it's like a visceral human reaction. It like, shame is the worst human emotion, and it turns on a dime into hate. And then you lose those people, and they will follow like, I saw this with all my Jewish friends. It's really there could have been ways to handle this that could have supported the only way to solve this was to get Netanyahu out of power. And the only people who can do that are the people who can vote there. And what we did instead was alienate every progressive Jew that I could see in Europe, at least, by making them feel like the whole world hated them and making them paranoid. And, like, I literally had to explain to a Jewish friend of mine, like, Trump is not your friend. Elon Musk is not your friend. A blow a broken clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean it's not broken. Like, go and read. Yeah. But he's supporting Israel. Yeah. He's still not your friend. Like, seriously, go and read what's on some of these far right forums in in America, and it's not friendly to the Jews. Trust me. And it's just like, if we could have gotten out of what I called the splitting of people are either all good or all bad, this performative allyship, this performance of perfection, then I think we would have lost a lot fewer people. I think a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump were not fascists at heart, were not people who deeply support I just read a book, American journalist on the American far right, and I think most people who voted for Donald Trump don't, like, they don't support that level of crazy. It is basically a bunch of neurodivergent guys in a basement on Reddit, on 4chan, on 8chan. And she did some really thorough reporting on this. Like, that's what kick started the MAGA movement, and and then it kind of, like, escaped the lab. But, of course, you can always trigger people's animal instincts in a mob type situation. We've had this here as well. You know, like, violent right wing mobs burning stuff. You've had your own violent mob at the capital. But most people who supported Hitler, who support Trump, etcetera, just wanted recognition of their financial struggles, just wanted recognition of their, like, being allowed to participate as full humans, not being looked down on. And we need to recognize the role that we, the intellectual left, played in making them feel that way and the role of the parliamentary left in completely abandoning them to the billionaire class.

Speaker 1 Can can we fold in? Like, I'm I'm so curious then, like, about that interdisciplinary approach and referring it back to building and then the experimental pedagogics. It made me think I had two completely independent different conversations this week with two different people in different education contexts that told me, like, PBL is not enough. And yet, I feel like pedagogically, maybe in The United States, like, we're sort of not trapped, but like it's a I don't know. It's a it's a closed room, you know, of of project based learning or design thinking and things like that. And fee us feeling the need to break out of that, the the building model that you've built there kind of blending in what we might traditionally think of like career or technical education or vocational training, like in a broader, I don't I don't know, intellectual context too. I don't know. I just I wanna kinda get your sense of like where have the last two years since that book, Thinking Ahead to the Future, like, taken the direction of building and, you know, the the pedagogies that you've used to help prepare those students for this future.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So I I've been kind of I I did talk about building and critical pedagogy and pedagogies of collapse. And, I mean, I went to I went to the one of the last summer schools of Schumacher College in The UK, which this really famous Eco College. I enjoyed it, but then I realized this is so elitist. Like, when you talk about plot phenomenology, there's no way that I'm doing that with a a working class student from Rotterdam South. But what appealed to me in the building, I went to visit Christian Cold's old like, it's now a a ruin, but the the old farm where he started the first Falk High School. And I don't know what happened there, but I got, like, some wind of inspiration blowing through the old thatched roof from that farm in it's about two hours out of Copenhagen. And I realized, but this was a place for farmers, not for, like, rich kids. And what did they learn here? About farming, first and foremost. And, of course, of course, like, if you wanted farmhands to come study there, they had to learn about farming. If you want working class kids to come to do liberal arts, they've got to learn about working class things like working with your hands, producing things, you know, how to earn money. They've gotta they've gotta support their families somehow. So, of course, we had to develop a program that wasn't another, you know, gap year experiential, that wasn't another microcollege to speak an American language. Microcolleges are great if you're rich and you can afford to take six months or a year out. Our students can't afford that. There's no way that some, you know, girl who's, you know, struggling working at a supermarket because her mom's a drug addict and and and dad is, like, a, you know, strict, you know, father from an immigrant background and and will barely let her out the house. Like, there's no way that she would be ever allowed, even if she could afford it, to take six months or a year to do a find yourself program. So I was like, hey, you know what? Working class kids deserve a chance to find themselves too. And we've got to do that in a context where they also get essential skills for their future profession. And, like, they all get a certificate from the university when they finish the climate school, which is super important because that means they can put a certificate from the university on their CVs when they go looking for a job. And they are working with companies, so they're actually getting internship company experience. It's counting out of their internship hours, which has cost me the levels of headaches with the administration bureaucracy and, like, the system. You cannot imagine the level of just Kafkaesque bullshit I have had to put up with to get this program up and running. As we speak, I still have three students that do not have a place in September because the government denied our request to accredit one of our partners, and the excuse they gave was, yeah, but your partner, they don't have a fixed office. I'm like, yeah, they're a diving school. Yeah. No. An internship means you have to be at the at your desk 32 a week. I'm like, which companies work like that these days? And he's like, yeah. No. Sorry. And I said, so what's your ideal of internship? And he basically said the Dutch equivalent of Walmart. And I'm like, okay. Okay. Okay. We'll find another solution. Fine. Fine. I I give up. Sometimes you gotta know when to give up and, like so principle of martial arts, right? I'm a martial artist and I think that came through the the whole book. It's like Yeah. At some point, you stop pushing and you find another, like, another way into the body.

Speaker 1 Yeah. If you can't, I guess, attack your opponent from the front or the bureaucracy in this case, you gotta find that point of leverage and I guess sort of, you know, hip toss them out of the way. I'm gonna I'll defer to Bill who, who must have been sitting on these questions for forty five minutes, because these are these are really awesome. A lot of the people in the chat are working with, you know, I know the the the college students that you're working with may be as young as maybe 17 or 18 or older sort of that early adulthood. A lot of people that we were going through the book club with are, you know, elementary, middle, through high school in The US context, you know, making that transition into college or, you know, call it the world of work or, like, whatever that that future for them is gonna look like. And, yeah, this is really interesting from Bill asking, would you have any ideas on how to apply that experimental pedagogics framework to small groups of high school students in the context of literature studies? Most of them are working class from migrant backgrounds. He's looking for maybe films, documentaries, or books that you'd recommend for kids kind of on that cusp and that transition. Like, I'm trying to think, Ginny, about, like, what would be like the pre building work that kids could do to get their attitudes and mindsets ready so that way, you know, if they were gonna walk into, you know, your school in Rotterdam, what would they what would they experience there? How can students in, like, the secondary school level work to have some kind of impact here? That's I think that's a an interesting focus for Bill.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Like, high school is a is it's a really interesting age. So, like, the essence of the I've had to to you know, you develop models, and and it's helps to structure your thinking and everything, and then the reality, you let me reality. And I've had to apply my model. My students are also 17 from the the they're coming to the climb school. So the ones that come from the vocational college are 17. And I've had to, like, really check myself every time. Also, like, my teaching staff is also spread between the vocational teachers, applied, and university teachers, and be like, okay. So what is actually the essence of the experimental pedagogics model? And the essence is we wanna start with ourselves and to, like, understand ourselves enough and who we are and how to regulate ourselves and our nervous systems before we take on really stressful, really overwhelming questions. It's, like, it's really about self regulation and who am I and what are my values and what moves me as a human. And then finding my place in a group where I belong. It like, having that community as a shield before I'm thrust into these massive overwhelming, you know, tragic questions of fascism and climate change and and the dismantling of civilization as we know it. And that's why we build up with we have this wonderful boxing therapist who does the reflection track in the climb school. And through every level, she processes it through the body with boxing with So journaling and boxing, basically, is how they they process it, but it's and we have this wonderful guy also who runs the building track, and and he's doing art with them and painting and constructing things and first for themselves. And then in a small group, we have a lot of singing in the group and cooking together, etcetera. And then we go it's towards the last towards the end of the climate school, we tackle the big, big issues, and then we have, like, one of our Kees Gomp, he's a quite famous collapsed economist in The Netherlands, comes in and and gives a talk. And we basically the principle is don't overwhelm them with it's this is where we went wrong. Right? Where we said, okay. So there's structural racism, and there's, you know, transphobia and all these intersectional things, and you have to deal with all of that. And if you don't deal with all of it perfectly, you're a bad person. And instead, we're like, okay. Well, where do your values come from? And we have to accept. Sometimes we don't like what we hear. I've got conservative Muslims in my class, and I've done a lot of work also with conservative Christian African communities. And this is, like, a real subject of sometimes productive, sometimes less productive tensions. I am very critical towards Christianity because I was subjected to it as a child, and I didn't like what I saw or experienced. As a queer person, it was not fun. But, you know, those are real productive tensions that we have to not ignore and and say, you know, it's okay to be you. You don't have to be threatened by somebody else not being on board with you a 100%. And, like, let's start here with nobody. What do you feel in your body when somebody tells you that? Like, when somebody attacks you for for being trans or gay or when somebody is not torn towards like, where do you feel that in your system? And we start that, you know, with breathing, boxing, dancing. And then we learn to navigate in a group. We had a girl this year who had, like, really intense anxiety, and she was asked to lead a singing, like, for her voice to be the leading voice in the singing, and everybody had to adjust to her, basically. So if she was too anxious to make more than a peep, then we all had to be just below a peep. And by the end, she was one of the models that walked on our catwalk. This girl who was so socially anxious that she couldn't be separated from her friend. Her friend was sick on that day, and she was walking the catlet catwalk alone. And that, like, that's the essence of the experimental pedagogics model. And I think you can apply that really I I think that at any age, we need to start with regulating yourself and then finding your place in a group and then tackle the overwhelming stuff.

Speaker 1 Sort of the idea, you know, what what's the what's the idiom? You know, put on your oxygen mask before helping your neighbor. You know, you need to be prepared, situated physically and emotionally to grapple with the issues before you can, you know, engage in the kind of Build Doom community, that interdisciplinary, you know, perspective that we've been talking about here.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know this for myself. Right? I I I really struggle sometimes with anxiety, with just being overwhelmed. I get I have terrible ADHD, so I get really flustered by stuff. You know, my attention especially when I'm under stress, my attention can be all over the place. And I'm super, super honest with my students about that. I'll be like, sorry. I'm having ADHD moment. Or, like, I'll be like, you know, I'm really anxious today. And just by being open and vulnerable, they're like, oh, so it's okay for me to also work through that. And then I'll be like, just give me a second. I need, like, a moment to ground myself and to role model that myself, you know, through my own body. That's something I've had to learn also to regulate myself and also find I'm super open, and that's also, you know, in my writing, but also in my new book and also in the school. I'm super open with students that I am trying to find ways to live with this stuff myself. And it's not like you figure it out, and then, oh, you know, all is well. No. When I see my country on fire, of course, I feel grief. I feel depression. I feel anxiety, I feel overwhelmed, and so I need a moment to, like, put myself back together. It's an ongoing process, and I keep telling that to students. You know, you're not gonna be out of this ever for the rest of your life. You're gonna have to learn. And some pain just cannot be regulated away.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That that, at least, is a clear takeaway in pedagogies of collapse is, like, grappling with that is really the first, I guess, the first step, you know, towards being able to do it is the the grief that we might feel about the loss of a of a future, right, is gonna be something that we're going to be experiencing as, you know, each subsequent event in that chain sort of occurs, you know, just just like it did with with the pandemic. I think that's a really that's a really great point. I wanna maybe come come back to Bill real quick here too. I think what is so, I I guess, important about what you're saying is that those things don't necessarily require, like, a curriculum. Right? They don't require radically restructuring the school day. A lot of our conversations in the book club were like, hey, you know, I'm the the low person here. I don't have a lot of leverage in my context. But maybe someone like Bill is like, how can I help get kids emotionally regulated? Well, here might be some steps to do that and then begin to open those conversations. You know? It's not gonna require any additional spending or restructuring the school day.

Speaker 2 So so let me be perfectly honest with you. I think the schools as we have them are next to pointless, even worse because they're teaching 100%. That it'll be okay when it won't. So there is definitely I I would incite you to riot and leave your schools and go and build your own building climate schools. And go and build something relevant, like, you know, teach kids to sew, teach kids to grow food, teach kids to cook, which is what we're doing. If I couldn't do the climate school, would leave my university job. Honestly, I have zero interest in going to teach statistics and qualitative research. Like, no. Fuck you guys. The world is on fire. Why would I do that? If if you make me do that, I will leave, and I will go and grow food and, like, learn how to grow food when there's no water. Because because that's the endgame. Right? The we're in the endgame now, and if you're not like, you've you will kill yourself as a teacher. Like, speaking to all of you, you will kill yourself if you keep teaching something that is irrelevant for the future. So it might sound I know also The US is, a fascist state with no social security net, so it's not like you can just, you know in Europe, we have very generous unemployment benefits, so you can go and figure out your life. You know, you rub it in. But, like, quit. If you cannot if you feel like what you're teaching is actually lulling students into a false sense that somehow the future will be okay, then, like, you're if you're here, then you already get it. And we need the people who get it to be on the forefront of the revolution. And, yeah, it's been such a struggle to build this school that puts, you know, survival skills first, that has the building component that but the thing that I managed to do somehow is to get the collaboration of three existing schools, the Vocational College of Rotterdam, the University of Applied Sciences of Rotterdam, and the University of Rotterdam to give me money to do this. I've received almost a million euros in funding for the climate school, including 500,000 from the government, 60,000 from the municipality, and the rest from my private money, like alumni and stuff. And I think the reason I managed to get funding for it and why you could get funding for this is by pitching it as a non as a non left wing aligned project. But, like, really, like, this is about the future of the working classes. I got money from a guy who's runs the development program for Rotterdam South, who is from the, basically, the Dutch MAGA. He's, like, from the Bei Bei Bei, which is the the party of Hert Wilders. You know, the blonde our own blonde So he's from that county, and he gave me €60,000 to build a climate school. Because I had a conversation with him. Like, I talk to people. I will talk to anyone. I mean, there are limits, but I will talk to plebe the vape politicians. And that is something that my left wing colleagues at the university will not do because they don't wanna get their hands dirty. But, you know, I worked in NGO backgrounds for a long time, and I know it from NGO background that if you don't get your hands dirty, you don't get anything done. So I sat down with this guy, and we had a very lucid conversation about what the transition economy could mean for the South Of Rotterdam and the harbor economy and the port and, like, our dependency on fossil fuels, you know, which we're seeing now with the Strait Of Hormuz, how that played out. And we had, like, a very reasonable conversation focused on on work opportunities for people in the South Of Rotterdam, his constituents, basically. And then he gave me €60,000. And that's like, you can do that. I promise you, you can. You can go and talk. Like, there is money out there. It's just being hoarded by the wrong people. And in The US, you guys are way more, like, screwed than we are in a way, but I didn't need that much money to get the climate school started. I think the first program maybe cost, what, like, $50,000. Yeah. And we could have done it with less. We could have done it with less. But, yeah, maybe $50,000 for the first edition. And then you've got something to show for it, and I got some of my former students who, like, run a film studio to make the Bill and Klein School documentary, which you can watch on YouTube if you want. Do you start to produce stuff, and then people can't ignore you, and then we won the sustainable teacher of the year award. And, you know, like, then then things start to snowball. And but it takes that moment of saying, like, you know what? I'm all in. Go.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think that is a wonderful place to wrap it up. I just wanna say a huge thank you to the participants here. Thank you so much for for Bill, for getting us teed up for that question in the chat. I did put a link in the chat to that documentary. I was able to find it real quick. But if you just type in the Build On Climate School into YouTube, you can find it. We'll we'll be sure to share the the chat out too in the in the Discord. But, again, I wanna just thank you all for spending the time with us here. I know I'd also talked last time about scheduling some kind of work session for us to just kind of process all of this together. I'll I'll do that here in the next week and send some things back out so then we can begin to bring this back and process what that might look like in our context. And, of course, a huge thank you, doctor Genie Servant Me Close, both for for the book to prompt this discussion and this important work, the work that you obviously do, on the ground for your students, globally for the communities that you work with, and for joining us today.

Speaker 2 Great. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. And and, like, I know it's hard, but you gotta keep up a realistic hope that it's still worth the fight. Good luck to you guys in America, especially.

Speaker 1 I appreciate that. Thanks, Ginny. Thank you all so much. Have a good rest of your day. Have a good evening, doctor doctor Servant Miklos. And Thank you. Yeah. Have a good weekend, everybody. Bye. Take care.

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