Guy Standing is an economist whose new book Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons has much to say about a key theme of the festival: bildung.

His thoughts on the corruption of education by policies that have lost touch with the public good are a provocative introduction to the kind of concerns explored when we meet.

In this conversation with Mark Vernon, Guy explores the extent of the challenges facing education in the 21st century, though his deep critique is, at once, an articulation of vision and what is means to be human.

As well as authoring a series of books on the commons, Guy is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London and a founding member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a non-governmental organisation that promotes a basic income for all.

For more on Guy’s book see https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/461384/human-capital-by-standing-guy/9780241688182

For more on Guy’s work see https://www.guystanding.com/

For more on the Realisation Festival see https://realisationfestival.com/

The Realisation Festival is much to do with perspective and gaining fresh takes on current issues. That widening of horizons is greatly aided by combining ideas with music, insights with improvisation. Laughing with others is liberating, too.

Mark Vernon talks with Pippa Evans and Christopher Ash from The Realisation Players. They explore how and why music and improvisation are so key to the gathering, linking body and soul, traditions past with the present, and also lending soul-refreshing levity to gravity.

For more on Chris - https://www.improbable.co.uk/current-projects/improbablesessions and https://about.me/christopherash

For more on Pippa - http://www.pippaevans.com/

A new paradigm is beginning to emerge in biology, though for some biologists, the new is, in fact, the old. The reductive treatment of living organisms, as if the gene were all, is giving way to the realisation that intelligence, even agency, operates at all levels of biological systems, from the proteins up.

There is no-one better to talk to about this development and what it implies than Professor Pauline Rudd, a regular at the Realisation Festival and leading glycobiologist, recognised most recently by being awarded the Torbern Bergman Medal 2025.

In this conversation with Mark Vernon, she explains what it is like to befriend biochemical molecules, to understand how they see the world around them, and thereby to form the science of their activity.

Pauline also explores how this integrates with her wider sense of the living world and its manifold intelligences.

For more on Pauline's professional work see https://kemisamfundet.se/torbern-bergman-medal-2025-to-pauline-rudd-university-college-dublin/