Wisdom and Storytelling - A Conversation with Deepak Ramola

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Wisdom does not limit itself to a degree. It expands itself to learning of all kinds. And that's what I feel like if you're able to bring into the education system, when you read other people's stories, when you learn from other people, you understand that everybody around you holds value. And that is the difference, you know, I'm trying to make.

Hi, thanks for tuning in for another episode of the podcast. It's great to be able to bring you the podcast in partnership with Notosh, and it was a huge pleasure this week to be able to sit down with Deepak to talk about some of the things that are most important to him, such as wisdom, life lessons, and storytelling. Deepak Ramola is the founder and artistic director of Project Fuel. He's a two-time TED speaker and a UN Action Plan executor, and has also previously served as a kindness ambassador for the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable sustainable development. Deepak founded Project FUEL in 2009 as a way to collect life lessons from people all over the world and turn them into interactive and performance activities, sharing insights from people of all ages, from women of the Maasai tribe to young girls in Afghanistan and sex workers of Kamatipura, earthquake survivors in Nepal to Syrian refugees in Europe. You can see more of the life lessons shared globally through the World Wisdom Map and even contribute your own. Project Fuels methodology has been recognized as a World Top 100 Innovation by Hundrd and has also been adopted by the Education Board of Antwerp in Belgium and schools across Asia and the US.

Hey Tim!

Hey, how are you doing? Brill! Well, thank you Deepak. We've met previously in different work in different spaces and it's been something I've really wanted to do is actually sit down with you and get into the kind of weeds of some of the ideas from your work with Project Fuel and the amazing stuff that you do. So thank you firstly for so much for joining.

Thank you so much for inviting me, Tim. Excited to be here.

Brilliant. So the first time I heard about your work was actually through the On Wisdom podcast with Charles and Igor, and they've been previous guests on the podcast with me. And because I have this interest in the concept of wisdom, And this was what drew me to your work, and you've been doing some amazing work all over the world around that kind of very broad framing, let's say, of wisdom. So we will touch on that, but it'd be great perhaps first for people who aren't aware of what you do with Project FUEL, if you just give a little bit of a sense of, to orient people about what Project FUEL is, where did it come from, what was the inspiration there?

Yes, Project FUEL, uh, the FUEL in Project FUEL stands for Forward the Understanding of Every Life Lesson. And it's a very simple idea that there are more than 8 billion people in the world. And if we were to just learn one thing from each person, we would have 8 billion perspectives. But why don't we learn that? And how do we come to discover and value those 8 billion perspectives and make them accessible? That's really the large question. Simple words, Project Fuel turns the world into a vast classroom where everybody gets to be an educator. The idea for it came from my mother, who unfortunately was removed from formal education and did not get to go to school. She was pulled out in grade 5 by her grandmother in late 1960s, who believed that women and girls should not get educated. And when I was growing up listening to my mother tell that story repeatedly, I never believed her. You know, my mother is one of the smartest people I know, and I thought But she must be lying and kidding about not making it to school because she's too smart to have not read philosophy, or she's too articulate to have not been on a debating team. And my mother's naive and honest answer to me was for the longest time that it's a fact I didn't go to school, but the truth is that I have learned by turning the world into my classroom. And that philosophy and that way of looking and engaging with the ecosystem and the environment she was part of really did something to me. It was revelatory to understand that here was my mother who didn't have a chance for formal education, and she was saying, I am learning from living. What can I do to find out that everyone who's living, what are they learning in their lives? And I couldn't find— I mean, even if today you Google like some random grandmother's name from Eritrea or, you know, an activist in Nepal, until unless they have been featured by some big platform, until unless they have been viral on social media, there are very rare chances even after that, that you'll get to know what is it that they stand for beyond this glimpse into their life of a social media piece. So yeah, that's the backdrop of—

Oh, it's so true.

Yeah, interesting.

And the way that it manifests itself seems to be in all sorts of these amazing creative strands. So, you know, there's the World Wisdom Map that you've been collating together and then you've got Wise Walls project and, and care packages and So maybe could you just, just give a little bit of a sense of how have those things, obviously collecting the life lessons being at the core, but how have those other things emerged?

For us at Fuell, you know, given that it started very early for me, I was 17 when I started, you know, documenting and passing on these life lessons. It manifested in many different ways over the years. We often joke inside the team that the life lesson actually demands the way it wants to travel the world.. And so we have to pay attention to it. So there are 3 major buckets at Fuel that we, or lenses we use to look at a life lesson. The first is education, and that is where a lot of designing people's experiences into curriculums comes into play. The second is arts and culture, and that's where we create projects like the Wise Wall Project, which is basically partnering with a village, documenting the life stories and wisdom of every person in every family of that village and hand painting that onto the walls of that village and turning the entire space into an open-air gallery. And we just don't paint it for the notoriety of it or for the beautification of it, but really painting to bring attention to the village and the challenges it's facing. We've worked with ghost villages in Uttarakhand suffering from heavy migration, you know, trying to bring in responsible tourism, reverse migration there. All the way to the Maasai in Tanzania raising money to be able to build water harvesting units for women who walk 9 hours. The painting becomes a way to communicate that wisdom in an accessible way. And then the third component is media, where we see, you know, a lot of documentaries, where we see a lot of storytelling and projects like the World Wisdom Map, which showcases life lessons from 195 countries, you know, from Nobel laureates to young children in schools becomes that hub to show that knowledge. So yeah, it's a lot of play. The, the three-part ways we do it, it's called Harvest, Play, Present. And Harvest is where the information and the learnings come in. The Play is where we actually investigate and negotiate with these nuggets of wisdom and stories and how they want to be translated. And Present part is what is the best way for someone else who does not know this person whose story we are relaying forward pauses to say, I know that, you know, that's a human emotion and I connect to it. So those are some of the filters.

Yeah, brilliant.

I love it. It really struck me actually when I was thinking about it yesterday that the 4 letters F-U-E-L are really significant because, you know, it's like the L, the life lessons, we'll come on to in a minute when we talk about wisdom, I think. But the E for every, everyone, I think that comes through so strongly in everything you talk about, is the, the epistemic justice around it. Like everybody's perspective is as valuable as everybody else's perspective. To your point about social media, or whether you've got a platform or whether you've not got a platform, your mother, grandmother, whoever, everybody has something to offer in terms of a perspective on the world. I think that's really powerful. Then the you, obviously, the understanding, and I think that's a really misunderstood word actually in a way, right? The sense that you just reading the life lesson is not How do you really understand it? And then the F is like you putting it out into the world. It's like forwarding it, sharing it. The World Wisdom Map is amazing. I particularly liked, I was looking at one yesterday of the jungle in Calais with the refugees there that you did. And that, you know, such powerful human stories when you start digging into the particular life lessons from the different refugees there, because often it's just a, it's a news item, right? With these kind of politics around refugees and the migrant crisis. And when you actually dig in, you see humans and faces and stories and life perspectives. It's really inspiring.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah, absolutely. The, the initials worked out well, but it was very intentional, you know. The— it was not just forwarding of the life lessons, as you said. It was forwarding the understanding, which takes into account that we all participate and we all consume knowledge in different ways. You know, I often say that wisdom without internalization, without understanding, becomes knowledge again. Only it's when you put it to use, not in the admiration of it, but in the use of it, it is wisdom. Otherwise, it's knowledge. And in these stories, accounting for that every person through every conversation, you know, giving yourself into that larger ocean of possibilities is phenomenal. You mentioned about the Calais refugee camp. Calais is known as one of the most volatile refugee camps in the world. In 2016, you know, we worked there for the Syrian refugee integration and obviously were exposed to many different nationalities. And Calais was always— every 15 days the French government released a satellite map of Calais, the refugee camp known as the jungle. And we got hold of that map, and it was very dehumanized in a way, you know. It was like, oh, all of these infiltrators, all of these people who are like, you know, barging in. But when you sat in the camp across people, you sat across human empathy, you sat across resilience, you saw in people hope for their life. There were men I met one night, and the next morning they were gone because they passed away, came under the truck they were chasing to get to the UK. And I remember that those stories and of those people demanded a certain honor. They demanded a certain respect from us as human beings. A young boy once said to me, why do you think anyone leaves their home? And I said, I've been just traveling around and I think the war drives it. And he said, it's the lack of dreams. You know, in that place.

Yeah.

When you stop dreaming where you are, that's when you go somewhere else. And he said, the war creates the smoke in which you cannot dream, but it's the dreaming that I am seeking. Those things remain with you because we all are doing that. Even if we are not in a war-torn place, we're doing that in our careers and at our homes. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the things, obviously, you talked about education briefly in terms of one of the kind pieces of work that you do, but I know that it's a personal passion of yours and you just, congratulations, you've just graduated from Harvard from the, for the Master's in Education program.

Thank you. Thank you.

So I would love to, love to talk to you a little bit about that because I think obviously the L of life lessons and what we've, you've been talking about there, the insights coming from people, from your mother, from, there's a sense and, you know, as soon as you start using the word wisdom, it it starts feeling different, right? Life lessons is accessible and it's everyone, you know, it's as we were discussing, quite democratic. As soon as you start talking about wisdom, it's something, you know, it becomes fusty and dusty and old books and old men and all of this stuff. And you know, that's a challenge when we think about the word wisdom. 'Cause there's, as you say, there's a lot more going on there that I wanna explore, but I'd love to think about with you, what, where do you think is the connecting point between wisdom and education? Because is there, like, for example, is there a correlation between if you have more— and in a way, your story about your mother tells the story— but a correlation of more education, more wisdom? What's your take on the link there between educating, education generally, and wisdom?

Any good wisdom comes from a good understanding and a good learning of the world you are in. And any good learning hopefully takes you to a place where you can take wise decisions. So I think it's fundamentally interlinked, you know, good education and a wise person. Unfortunately, we don't prepare in our traditional education systems our children to be wise. We prepare them to be smart and intelligent. I've been running this sort of a social experiment for the last decade where I ask teachers, parents, caretakers, mentors. What are the words, adjectives you want for your child? And never in 10 years I have heard the word wise, even though the highest pinnacle of human cognition is wisdom because it marries, you know, not just knowledge but the use of knowledge in an appropriate context for the larger good. And I think that's the gap that I have been trying to fill or trying to understand and trying to collaborate in is how do we actually not just raise smart kids, but nurture wise children, children who are adept in the possibility of taking better decisions, not just from an individual standpoint, but from a collective standpoint. And COVID revealed this, right? The pandemic exposed our vulnerability that we weren't prepared to deal with things like grief, things like talking to somebody who's absolutely marinated in fear, or going back to a change that you haven't negotiated for. No curriculum book teaches you these kind of things. They come from experience, and they come from learned and borrowed experience. And I think where I am trying to enter the realm of education and learning is allowing people to not see school as the only place of learning. Many years ago, because my mother has been such fundamental cornerstone of my journey. Many years ago in school, our school principal in the assembly, in the morning assembly, asked, "A person who hasn't gone to school, is that person educated?" And because I knew my mother and I knew that she was so phenomenal, you wouldn't believe, Tim Logan, I was the only person whose hand was up. And I remember that morning so distinctly because I thought, you know, what school helps you do is get literate. I have met a lot of people with double PhDs and postdoctorates and not wanting to stand them for more than 5 minutes, you know, I'm like, "Oh, where's that train to Bangkok I need to catch from this party?" And people in rural hinterlands, people from indigenous communities who have not read a single written word in their lives, but are so interesting and so gracious and so graceful that I've spent weeks with them.

You're not drawing things and communicating without words and just drawing or gesturing things.

And I think that differentiation, you know, sort of addresses the question you asked. Wisdom does not limit itself to a degree. It limits, or it rather expands itself to learning of all kinds. And that's what I feel like if you're able to bring into the education system wisdom and the need for wise reasoning, wise decision-making, we might not only be able to create a generation that is forward-looking, future-thinking, but a generation that is empathetic in the present, you know. And that's what happens when you not just read inspirational stories because you want to be better, when you read other people's stories, when you learn from other people, because you understand that everybody around you holds value. And that is the difference you know, I'm trying to make. A lot of traditional education asks you, how will you use what you're learning today for the world you want to create? A lot of wisdom says, what do you want to know now to be able to better understand what exists? So that dance between the future and the present, I think, does not just come from narrow alleys of intelligence. It comes from, you know, wide fields with wildflowers of wisdom, at least to me.

I love it.

Yeah, no, that's, it's a particular area of interest of mine, the way that the word education gets used. So obviously I asked you the link between wisdom and education, but that word itself, as you gave the example of the assembly, it is so clearly associated with formal schooling. Or formal instruction, university level, that the concept of someone being educated, having never gone to a formal school seems antithetical, right? It seems not, it doesn't seem at all possible. But I, I always think about my, like, for example, my role as a parent. And I've been asking this question frequently to many different people in different fields, other parents or other just people working in different fields. Do they see their role as educational in any way. And I, every parent I've ever asked absolutely sees their role as a parent as having an educational function. So there's education going on there, right? Your mom was teaching you things. There's education just kind of flowing in the, in the networks between people in so many different ways, I think. And how do we reclaim this idea of education being, you know, the support that people, to enable people to learn. Obviously you can learn on your own, but often you're learning in collaboration with other, and as you said, a kind of modeled experience. Sometimes you're being modeled things by someone else. So I think there's something interesting going on there because then you get much more into the sense of practical, applied, experiential knowledge and, you know, and, and then potentially wisdom.

Yeah. And you're not confined by the ignorance of a individual, a system, you know, a textbook. You actually turn your entire body into this living curriculum that's learning and borrowing and thriving. And I think that's way more fun than just saying my math textbook, that's what it teaches, my science textbook, that's what it teaches.

Yeah, you know, so, so that's an interesting question then. How do you, with Project Fuel, kind of hack the formal schooling system? Because are you of the opinion that you can actually teach something of value in relation to wisdom? Can it be taught by an educator, or is it something else? Is it some, as you said, experiential, or is there something else going on?

That's a great question. You know, not only can you teach and sort of relate to this larger connection, one of the pillars of the FUEL methodology is establishing relationships, which is creating patterns between two disjointed things, two seemingly disconnected things. We come to learn of one subject in relation to that subject. We come to learn of it in relation to other subjects. You know, when we sit down in Project FUEL to discuss and look at formal and traditional curriculums, we ask ourselves often the questions that are not in the room. For example, if you're learning algebra in mathematics, can you ask yourself, what is the etymology of algebra? You know, it means the reunion of broken parts, or bone setting, for example. But we never learn math for language. We never learn poetry for mathematics. There are some phenomenal poems that have been written with almost a formulaic presentation. You know, the structure of it borrows from math. Can you learn science in relation to history? Can you learn, you know, history in relation to Literature, those are the connections where wisdom is already present. I've really asked children, can you, in math classrooms, can you tell me a poem? And they're like, oh, that's in the classes 3 hours later in English classroom. We will be doing and serving, you know, the best wisdom we can, allowing our children to not bucket and label everything like generations prior to us in a very industrial way have done. In a conveyor belt fashion, you know, 40-minute class on math and then you go to English class.

Yeah.

I think if we were able to overlap and sort of create these merging points of information, we will be teaching for wisdom because wisdom in many ways is presenting a different perspective as well or exploring the same thing from many different perspectives.

Yeah.

When I talk about etymology in a classroom, kids are more interested in algebra than they were probably prior because now they understand, ah, okay, I know what bones setting is, because I broke my arm riding that bicycle the other day. What did the doctor do to join this or to fix this? Giving young children metaphors of relatability, of accessibility, I think, is creating space for that wisdom to occur. And wisdom is not some, you know, an external piece of knowledge that you have to now insert as, you know, an add-on to the cart, but it's It's there. It's in the investigation. It's in the questions that you're asking, you know, fairly simple questions. I remember one time in a science classroom, I was asking children, if you could ask God a question about science, what would you ask him? And I remember one girl said, Dear God, why have you stopped inventing new animals? All the animals in the world are the ones that have been there since time immemorial. So have you stopped imagining? You know, those are brilliant questions that young people are already asking. It's just giving them the space to ask them without embarrassment and without fear.

Love it. Interesting.

You could also ask, which God?

That's true.

Depends which part of the world you are in. Exactly.

Exactly. No, that's brilliant. That's fascinating. And actually, it leads nicely on to the question I did want to ask you. And we've spoken briefly about this previously before. About the wisdom of children, because I think in the formal education system, it sets up this whole dynamic of the expert, the teacher who knows, and the novice, the learner who doesn't know, who is coming into knowing. And there's not a lot of trust there of young people in terms of their own perspectives. And I just, I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on, obviously they, they don't know a lot yet in the official formal schooling sense, but also potentially they haven't actually had that many opportunities yet for lots of rich experience. And if wisdom is coming from those connected meaning-making experiences, you know, I don't know what you— can children be wise is the headline, but is that something that comes with age and experience, or is it something that we can take seriously in young people?

It's a question that, that has surprised me the most in the last 13 years of doing this wisdom documentation. It is the wisdom of children. And if the headline was, can children be wise? I would be probably screaming from rooftops, hell yes. And we need to pay more attention to them.

Yeah.

The question that we ask is, can children be wise, is often from an adult lens, standing far off on a distant hill and screaming down the valley where children are, you know, that's the imagery that comes to mind. Do you know enough? But the question is, they know enough for where they are. A 4-year-old knows perfectly well what a 4-year-old knows. A 13-year-old knows perfectly what a 13-year-old is going through. We can assume when we were 13 what being 13 felt like, but that's only a proxy for this 13-year-old who's feeling something completely different in the time he or she or they are in. And I think that question sort of, Tim, becomes redundant because As an adult, do we know enough, right, about anything? We might know about something in our own little context. Wisdom as even research— there's a brilliant, you know, wisdom researcher and psychologist, Igor Grossman. He has written extensively about how wisdom is contextual. If you ask a young person today about technology and ask a 100-year-old person about technology, the young child is supposed to be far more adept and far more knowledgeable and skilled wise in technology than a 100-year-old who doesn't even know how to operate a smartphone. But if you ask a 100-year-old about romantic relationships or surviving health, you know, in, in an ever-changing world, for sure there is going to be a lot more knowledge that that person will possess, you know, by the virtue of age and experience. Wisdom is very contextual, and because we use age as a proxy for wisdom we equate it with experience, which it is not, you know, every person's experience is very individualistic. It's very appropriate for where they are. And just because they're not older does not mean, you know, we will sort of nudge them to say wisdom lies on the other side of the graduate school mountain with a lot of debt and a lot of gray hair on your head, and a bit of frowns on your forehead. And then you're convinced you're wise. Nobody has surprised me more and taught me more in the last 13 years than young children. There's a life lesson from a 4-year-old boy from Bulgaria, and the lesson is, never eat an ice cream from both ends. You'll not enjoy it and you'll make a lot of mess. I think that lesson, you know, comes so often to me for the mess I'm trying to clear, or, you know, how I'm trying to overdo my to-do list for the day. And children are also able to demonstrate a lot of the skills that wisdom is, you know, said to be constructed of. Wisdom is, is not this abstract philosophy that we have known it to be. The last decade or so, through neuroscience, through cognitive science, psychology, we've been able to prove that wisdom is an amalgamation of different skill sets. 7 to 8, you know, has been a consensus around emotional regulation, intellectual humility, reflection, you know, taking perspective, dealing with uncertainty. All of these things come together to form a wise person. And if you see when these individual skills in relation to a child— I think a child has intellectual humility because they're always curious. They are saying, this is what I don't know about what I don't know, so please tell. There might not be that deeper level of reflection, but I think with, with how social media is, with how identity shaping is happening in the world, there is that reflection setting in. I see young people that I teach now versus the one I taught when I was 17 years old. There's a big difference between how they ask questions and what they want to know. They don't want to do the small talk. They want to get right into the bones of things. I was speaking to some kids last week and I said, can you be good? And they said, define good. And I said, well, I mean, you know, I was giving them a very obscure definition. And they said, that good looks very different from my good. And this child was 7 years old. And I thought, well, that's fair. So that kind of notion of children learning and children giving, if you want, I can share one particular anecdote.

Yeah, sure, please.

Many years ago, I used to work with visually impaired children in India when I had just started out. And I was in a classroom with visually impaired children, nearly 60 of them. And I asked the facilitator who was also visually impaired, if I could ask children, what was the benefit of being blind? You know, by then I had been teaching, I think, nearly 2,000 visually impaired children, and everybody had that, you know, very sob story around them. But when I met them, they were always jovial, they always had a good outlook. And the facilitator said to me, no, no, no, it's going to cause a lot of trauma to the children. So I said, has anybody asked this question? You know, she said, no, nobody has asked. I can tell you, I was born blind. There's nothing good that comes out of it. I somehow negotiated and convinced her to let me speak to 4 children. When I asked those 4 children, the first one said, the benefit of being blind is that you can listen very well. So you can actually be an active listener. The second one said to me, her name was Nisha, and she said, I can see a rainbow when there isn't one. And as we went around the room, we could finish all 60. I could see the facilitator almost gobsmacked with what she had just consumed from these children and never seen it that way. I think if we allow children to be respected for what they know now, in the age and the experience they are in, we might find the courage in ourselves to call it wisdom and not tag it as, oh, that's an old soul.

Absolutely amazing. No, I completely agree. And I think it really made me think actually when you were talking about experience that even the way I framed the question was implicit in it was the accumulation of more experience leads to more wisdom, right? And actually what I'm reflecting on as you're talking is that kind of the depth of the experience you can have. At any age is enough, right? It's, it's somehow it, it is what you are experiencing. And if you can somehow reflect into that richly, there's so much there. You don't need a lifetime's worth of it. So it's interesting. It made me, made me really think. Thank you. That's cool. So one of the things, I mean, you do this magnificently anyway yourself in terms of telling stories, and I'd love listening to you.

So thank you.

But the first, I know that you are a writer and a storyteller as well. And a poet. And I also am interested in the role of story. And when we think about learning, because there is a sense of being drawn into an experience or, or as you said, multiple perspectives and these kinds of things, when you're being told a good story by a good storyteller, you know, you, you come into their world, you inhabit a new place. It's very powerful for learning. But I also think just from on a social level, the idea of narrative and story, and we are surrounded by stories that we just accept to be true, right?

Yeah.

I was listening to Yuval Noah Harari talk about money, for example. Money's just a story that we all agree is a good enough story for us to use on a daily basis. And so I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are about how does story and learning and wisdom then interact in that flow of insights and perspective and creativity?

Yeah, that's quite a good question. Because it asks us to dissect storytelling, and not just take it as this one big mountain, but these grains of sand that form this large pile. A good story is interactive, by the very nature of being a good story or a good storytelling session, it pulls people in, it extends an arm, it invites Yeah, which is very different from story messaging. That's what a lot of ads do. They're trying to sell something. A good story is trying to tell you and bring you to the world in a different way, the same world or a different world, and then allow you to discover whatever you want to discover. It can nudge you with what you should think about a certain character, but what it is trying to do is it's creating moments of understanding. And I think good wisdom that has come to us from generations. If you see the Eastern philosophy, if you see the Western philosophy, if you see Confucius' work and Socrates and Aristotle and the Vedas, they are all stories that have come to us. So we have a vast, I would say, evidence in human history and human civilization that most wisdom has been passed down to us in form of these rich stories, you know, pulsating with characters and plots and climaxes that allow us to see a reflection of ourselves. And these stories mirror our emotions. Stories are also crucial, I think, Tim, because stories are full of metaphors. And it is these metaphors that we borrow to live. You know, there's a brilliant book called Metaphors We Live By, in which the authors talk about how a particular metaphor and the usage of it dominates our entire life, because we treat time as a commodity, as a money, you know, productive thing. We say, I wasted my time, I invested my time, my time is running out. But there are certain indigenous communities in the world that I've met that don't think of time as a commodity. And that changes their entire relationship with time. So good stories laced with good metaphors allow us to paint a canvas in which we can negotiate our position, we can see our flaws without taking the risk onto ourselves. A good story is a good play. You know, it's a play, it's not going to, you know, threaten you in a real consequence, but it's going to fundamentally change or teach you something that you can borrow for a real life.

Yeah.

And a lot of these folk stories, if you see proverbs, if you do, you know, sit-down sessions with grandparents, with elders from communities, they will not preach. They will tell you stories, and then you make, you know, understandings and connections by yourself. So I think stories, wisdom, and learning are almost like, you know, a good lemonade. You don't know where the water ends and where the lemon begins and where the sugar ends and, you know, where that ice begins, but you feel it all together, and then you are able to feel content.

Beautiful.

Yeah, exactly. And I know, I think I've found that really interesting thinking about metaphor previously, just in terms of how you see the language you use differently when you start becoming aware of metaphor, cuz it's everywhere, right? You know, even earlier on I said about understanding, right? You're standing under something as though that's somehow you are close to it, or there is just this sense of the richness of imagery and metaphor in all the language, or so much of the language we use. But I do also think, I'm not sure how much space is allowed in the formal schooling system. Let's talk, it's not education broadly construed, but when we talk specifically about schooling, when you're saying this kind of interweaving of learning and play and story, and you know, I completely agree with you, but I don't think that's valued particularly in the formal set. Cause you know, we then start focusing on propositional knowledge and can this be communicated and what's the exam and what's this, you know, all of the, the kind of output-oriented focus. We, we lose the story and we lose the play. They're kind of the first things to go. But as you say, that's where so much of the power of intergenerational mutual learning is happening actually, is in those in-between spaces of the stories and the play, et cetera.

Yeah, we, we, we, it's changing and that's an optimistic thing in the world, but I think there is a lot of push for somebody to be an engineer, but not an ethnographer. You know, there is so much push to be an astronaut, but not an artist. And not just as a career standpoint, as a personality standpoint. You know, an example I would like to give you in Pittsburgh here in the US, we've been running a project for the last 3 years with, with about 22+ schools at this point with the Grabill Foundation. And what we do basically is we train young children in being these mini ethnographers. And documenting the wisdom and the stories of their teachers, their non-academic staff, their bus drivers, their gardeners, their community. And when they finish documenting these stories, they have to create a physical wisdom corridor in which they have to put the photograph of the person, their face, their story, and write it. In that project, what we realized is that these children were not only just interested in the story, they were interested in if that story was being told in the manner that it would resonate with somebody. We had elementary school children sitting with their principals on an ice cream date and saying, that's not the question I asked you. I asked you, why do you feel this way? You're telling me all the other stuff. I want to know why you feel this way. And now imagine, like, picture an elementary school child questioning their principal that the story you are trying to tell me, you're trying to, you know, manipulate it or structure it because you think I don't get it. I want you to know that there are a lot more people who are going to read it who will get it. So say it the way you want to say it. And that project has, you know, traveled across the world. It has allowed young children to ask questions and be those ethnographers. And I think that's what probably we need a little bit more of in school, this area of not seeing wisdom as pedestal thing, but as this pedestrian thing that is everywhere. And changing that relationship has changed my life. I can tell you as an individual, it has phenomenally liberated me from wanting to sound profound all the time. You know, when I ask adults, give me your life lesson, I can see their face expressions change. They are so consumed by this need to say something magnificently profound.

They're petrified.

Yeah, exactly. They're petrified. They're like, oh my God, okay, I gotta say something that will knock the socks off of somebody who's listening to it. Whereas younger people, they are trying to say the truth. They are trying to say— I had this one young child who said, never kiss with braces on. And that life lesson was, I think, more useful to me in my teenage years than any of the adult wisdom about relationship or whatever it was. And I think it's that relation that we need to explore in schools between fun and learning.

That's brilliant.

Yeah, no, that's fascinating. And I can say as an anthropology graduate, I am fully in support of more ethnography everywhere. So yeah, no, that's absolutely brilliant. It's really powerful. So, and it, I mean, actually it kind of connects with the, the last thing I wanted to ask you just in terms of where do you see your role now in relation to obviously having just done the master's and this, this huge body of work behind you and with your team all across the world doing different projects as you described in terms of supporting, because that's the focus of the podcast. And the thing that I'm particularly interested in is kind of that focusing on how do we find the leverage points and shift the formal schooling system as it currently is to be more enriching and more playful and more storyful and all of these things we've been talking about. Where do you see your role in terms of what you would like to do in that space?

I think there are two things that come to mind. The first is introducing wisdom as play and not as this obscure, large philosophical exploration, you know, that needs to happen at, at a later stage in life. Just wisdom as play and that participation in that play where the child reveals to oneself what is it that they learn and what it is that the world has learned, you know, from this thing that they're learning. It might be a story, might be a life lesson. And all these projects that I was mentioning, the Painting of the Villages, the Wisdom Corridor, are manifestations of that wisdom as play. And I think that's the first thing that, that in a very tangible way comes to mind. And the second is, we have this huge repository of life lessons from all around, from 195 countries. And we would really like for educators to use them. You know, there are educational modules designed on the life lessons of Syrian refugees on accepting change for anybody in the world. There are life lessons of, you know, young children on negotiation skills. You know, I often joke, if you haven't met a teenager who's trying to bargain with their parents for a sleepover at their friend's place, you haven't really met a good negotiator, right?

That's true, from experience.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm sure you, you know a lot of that personally. So a lot of this cross-pollination of knowledge. With Project Fuel, our vision is to create a world wisdom bank with this learning from all across the world, not just for this generation, but for generations to come. So that when 100 years later, another Tim Logan and another Deepak are you know, sitting down to have a conversation about wisdom and learning and education, they can say, oh, that's what the 8 billion people in that year of that era knew about life. How far have we come from that knowledge, and how closer are we to each other in the pursuit of it? So yeah, I think we've created many tools and resources to manifest that. Collaboration is the most beautiful way to make it happen anywhere.

Sure.

And that's what I'm a big champion of. I always say, when you learn, you become a star. When you teach, you become a constellation. And when we teach each other our stories, our methodologies, our perspectives, I think we are richer in many non-monetary ways.

Fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this— I love the idea that educators can use the stories as a resource. You know, even tomorrow they can go and we'll put the links in the show notes to the World Wisdom Map. And I think that's that's an immediate thing that can really, you know, because there's so much there. It's really rich, as we were saying earlier, with the human insights in all these different places. But also, is it possible for people to upload their own life lessons?

Absolutely. And that's the great reward. You come and read other people's stories, but you submit yours. And that translates into an educational module and travels and becomes your legacy. So if you really want to create a one-shot impact in the world, I often tell people without Donating even the, you know, a small dollar or a pound, share your life lesson and let it travel the world. And we'll come back to report how many lives it has touched over the years to everybody.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Deepak. It's a real pleasure to sit down and talk about this stuff. I think it's really vital. And I love the different people that I'm meeting who are doing kind of similar things, but from different starting points and in different ways. And yeah, thank you so much for Being proud of it.

Thank you for speaking, and thank you for the amazing questions. Always fun talking to you, Tim.

Thank you.

Brilliant.

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