Here are selected podcast episodes on which we were invited as guests. These podcast series have a wide range of guests and I try to bring in a fresh perspective to the conversation.
In this episode of Leading by Nature, host Giles Hutchins is joined by Benjamin Freud, founder of Coconut Thinking, for a dynamic exploration of regenerative education and deep learning in service of life. Together, they challenge the limitations of mechanistic materialism and the idea of the autonomous individual, opening instead to ways of learning and leading that embrace complexity, emergence, and the space in-between self and world. Drawing on examples from the Green School in Bali, they explore how young people engage with complexity differently, the power of placing students and adults on an equal hierarchy, and why playfulness, flow, and even trouble are essential ingredients for growth and emancipation.
Sept 2025: Breaking The Paradigm Podcast
What if the only thing that mattered in a presentation wasn’t eye contact or slide design, but whether you moved your audience to think and feel differently? What if students earned recognition not for compliance, but for making meaningful gifts to the world?
Benjamin’s work dismantling symbols of power—removing teacher desks, using first names, involving students in policy-making—reveals what true transformation costs: the surrender of social capital by the educated elite.
Real change isn’t about management techniques; it’s about who holds authority and why. Benjamin reframes education around contribution rather than accumulation—learning as gifting, where the question shifts from “What did you learn?” to “What did you give?”
July 2025: Getting Smart Podcast
Join us on the Getting Smart Podcast as host Mason Pashia dives into regenerative design in education with Benjamin Freud, Ph.D., Head of Upper School & Strategic Lead, Regenerative Education at Green School Bali and co-founder of Coconut Thinking. Together, they discuss how schools can move beyond sustainability to embrace regenerative practices that create conditions conducive to life—not just for students but for all living beings. Explore the difference between sustainable and regenerative design, how to foster emergence in learning, and why the future of education requires a life-centered approach. Tune in to rethink systems and embrace the messy, transformative potential of education!
Mar 2025: Green Sparks Podcast
What if education took its cues from nature?
Nature operates without waste—an approach we’re integrating into learning through biomimicry. By studying nature’s principles, students develop innovative solutions to real-world challenges.
In the latest Green Spark Podcast, our host Charlotte Hankin sits down with Benjamin Freud, Ph.D., our Head of Upper School, to discuss the launch of our Biomimicry & Regeneration Design (BiRD) Lab. This groundbreaking initiative empowers students to explore nature-inspired design that regenerates ecosystems, strengthens communities, and drives sustainable economies.
Mar 2025: Thriving Future Podcast: What is it for education to be regenerative?
No matter how long ago it was for some of us, our experiences in educational settings have a huge impact on how we go on to behave in the world. The ideas we encounter, the values we form, the relationships we develop and the ideas of ourselves we create in these spaces and phases of our lives often prove to be foundational.
But schools, nurseries and universities are just as likely to reflect and perpetuate the dominant paradigm of control, separation, extraction and short-termism as any other.
In this episode we speak to educational pioneer Benjamin Freud about a school that is trying to do things differently. Benjamin is Head of Upper School at Green School Bali which is working to re-design curriculums, re-think assessments and re-imagine power dynamics to lean into an understanding of the world as alive and uncontrollable and steward learners who can truly contribute to a thriving world.
Mar 2025: Mosscast: A multivoicED podcast: Charlotte shares her fantastic international experiences of being an educator and a consultant. We talked about her PhD journey, inspiring work with children and animals, as well as a few creative projects.
Mar 2025: Phenomenal Conversation #35 Biocentric Education – Learning in Service to Life. Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. of the Green School Bali outlines biocentric education—a shift from individual achievement to learning in service of the entire community, human and beyond. Benjamin is also refreshingly open about the challenges and shortfalls of their experimental approach.
Feb 2025: EDU Leaders Speak
How can education evolve to align with nature and sustainability? What if schools embraced biomimicry to solve real-world challenges and create thriving learning environments? In this thought-provoking episode, I talked with Dr. Benjamin Freud, Head of Upper School at Green School Bali and Co-Founder of Coconut Thinking. As a leader in regenerative education, Benjamin pioneers innovative strategies that draw inspiration from nature, fostering emergent learning and sustainable solutions.
Nov 2024: International Schools Network: From Roots to Passions
In this interview, Dr. Benjamin Freud—Head of Upper School at Green School Bali and founder of Coconut Thinking—shares the journey and insights that shaped his role as an influential environmental educator.
Key themes:
•Advice for schools looking to make bigger changes in terms of their environmental impact and goals for sustainability.
•Personal experiences of school, the importance of understanding the why when learning and the benefits of a University environment.
•A varied career and the motivation to teach.
•Diverse teaching experiences, the key successes and challenges.
•Leaving a traditional international school settings for the Green School, Bali, the curriculum and schemes of learning.
July 2024: Green School: Regenerative Education in the Balinese Jungle
I was interviewed by Kelly Wilson, Dean of High Tech High’s Graduate School of Education. We discussed:
🥥 Why we shouldn’t use the word “impact”;
🥥 How we can grasp the voices of those human and other-than-humans who have benefitted from learners’ projects;
🥥 How schools have lost their way by getting obsessed with outcomes.
July 2024: The Preservation of Positive Energy in the World
“It doesn’t matter where we start, we’re just at the right place, just like bamboo”
Dr. Benjamin Freud is the Head of Upper School at Green School, Bali, where he is responsible for guiding and enriching the Middle and High School learning programme in line with Green School’s holistic and sustainability-centered educational philosophy, as well as providing leadership and day-to-day management of the Upper School learning neighborhood faculty and staff.
June 2024: Co-Designing with Kids and the Bio-Collective
How do you design learning in your classroom/school?
Imagine inviting student input on everything from the way the timetable is organized, to the design of learning experiences, even to how they are assessed and evaluated.
That’s the kind of voice and choice The Green School Bali provides its learners. And their learners are empowered as a result.
In this illuminating podcast episode, Head of the Upper School/Learning Dialogist/Writer/Podcaster Dr. Benjamin Freud and I unpack:
January 2024: Cultivating Wonder through Emergent Learning
What if schools encouraged more questions than answers and aimed for learning that contributes to the thriving of all life?
Let’s tell a different story of re-wilding learning, where individual and collective wonder drive education towards creating a better world.
January 2024: Kindness based curriculum with Benjamin Freud, Ph.D.
This episode brings an inspiring and thoughtful conversation with Benjamin Freud, a French educator and father who is now the Head of Upper School at Green School in Bali. During the conversation we talked about the role of progressive schools, how learning as a machine is different from learning as something alive and also some reflections about life perspectives.
If you had the power to change or reinvent the educational system, how would you start?
December 2023: Practical Bravery—Coconut Thinking!
In this episode, we unravel some of the threads of culture, technology, and human experience, exploring how education shapes our understanding of ourselves and our place in a rapidly evolving global society. We ponder questions central to our time: How does the digital age redefine our learning landscapes? What roles do empathy, creativity, and connection play in crafting a more inclusive and compassionate world? From the classrooms of prestigious international schools to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, OUR guest’s diverse experiences have shaped his understanding of education as a dynamic, living ecosystem. His philosophy champions a holistic approach to learning, one that nurtures not just academic prowess but also the emotional and social well-being of individuals. A warm welcome to you, and to my guest as we explore practical bravery in coconut thinking – with Dr Benjamin Freud.
Join us in an episode of “The Infinite Game,” where we sit down with Dr. Benjamin Freud, a visionary in the realm of education and learning. Dr. Freud, the co-founder of Coconut Thinking, brings a wealth of experience from his varied career, starting in Silicon Valley’s dynamic environment in the late 1990s and transitioning through roles in consulting across diverse sectors, before delving into the world of education. His journey has taken him through leadership roles in some of the world’s most innovative schools in the US, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and now Bali’s renowned Green School.
April 2023: Flourishing Education Podcast—What if Nature had a seat on school governance boards?
What would happen if we humans slowed down and started looking at our relationships – with ourselves, others and most importantly our planet?
What if nature had a seat on our boards?
These are two of the questions (among many others), I asked the wonderful Charlotte Hankin, FRSA and Benjamin Freud, Ph.D., FRSA whom I invited for another imperfectly perfect conversation on the Flourishing Education podcast.
They shared their new initiative in collaboration with Michelle Blanchet and Andy Middleton.
Every time I [Fabienne] spend time with Charlotte and Benjamin, i always feel inspired and energised.
Thank you both for sharing with me.
I love your work because it gives me so much hope. 🙏🌺🌱
I [Fabienne] absolutely love the work that Charlotte and Benjamin are doing with Coconut Thinking to disrupt the way we educate and parent our children and young people in order to help individuals and organizations create, develop, stress test, and implement their ideas for sustainability and regenerative design.
I wanted to talk to them in particular about their WISR conceptual framework developed with Louka Parry, Education Futurist for the purpose spreading “awareness and action” on Regeneration.
Benjamin explains that revolutions by definitions don’t happen at the core, because the system doesn’t want to kill itself. So the revolutions have been on the fringe. He explains the mechanistic versus the living systems approach and how they determine how approach to nature.
We are not beings, we are becomings.
A fascinating conversation about how we can bring about change and what we can do from an individual perspective so ALL can flourish.
On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast Nate McClennen is joined by and , authors, consultants and advocates for the environment, for people and for a more sustainable future. At Getting Smart, we are thinking a lot about – sustainable and equitable and inclusive future.
March 2022: MindShare EdTechTV recorded podcast with Dr Benjamin Freud, Co-Founder Coconut Thinking
I spoke with Robert Martellacci, Founder of the Mindshare Report. We talked about a curriculum of kindness, how anything less than a systems change would lead to a post-pandemic snap back, and how problem-solutions mindsets won’t get us to where we need to be.
Jan 2022: Podcast: O.R.B.I.T.I.S. Consulting – Student-Centered Learning: Deeper and Beyond
This is an open talk that features Benjamin Freud, Ph.D., the educator who advocates more questions than answers, in a mutual exchange with the host about how skills taught in class remain limited, how curricula and assessment can be redesigned to meet our multidisciplinary real-world needs, and how those needs are far beyond students. Benjamin explains that bio-centrism is our only way towards a better and more equitable future. The episode is a double call to action from Benjamin Freud and the host as they both emphasize the role of a “possible” change mindset, self-paced schools, and qualitative methods in building bridges and making impact.
Dec 2021: Podcast: Rebel Educator – Bio-collective Goals and the Importance of Kindness, with Benjamin Freud, Ph.D
It was a real pleasure to speak with Tanya Sheckley from UP Academy, Inc. We discussed many issues including going beyond the Sustainable Development Goals, the need to recognize our place within the bio-collective, and the importance of thinking beyond the mechanistic frameworks of cause and effect. All this around the idea that we can have a curriculum of kindness.
How comfortable are you with not knowing, how often do you change your mind? How do cultures of personalised learning arise? What happens when the boundaries of disciplines dissolve, replaced with meaningful projects that can have an impact on themselves, others, and the world?
Coconut Thinking 