For years, the Common Good Podcast has explored the significance of place, the structures of belonging, and the gifts that emerge when people are invited to contribute to their communities. Today, we're introducing a new podcast that shares many of those same interests. Daniel Yudkin is a social psychologist and researcher who's developing a new political philosophy called Potentialism, built around a simple but surprisingly radical idea: everyone has something to offer. Potentialism asks what it would look like to build our communities, institutions, and even our politics around the belief that everyone has gifts worth discovering, developing, and sharing and that we all have a part to play in helping one another flourish.

For the remainder of the year, we'll share ten episodes of The Beacon Project Podcast, which he describes as a public workshop for Potentialism. In these episodes, Daniel talks with people who are helping him explore and develop Potentialism.

Our first guest is someone many of you already know: Sam Pressler.

What happens when people have something to offer but nowhere to offer it? In this episode, Daniel talks with Sam about his research on friendship, isolation, and purpose among men without college degrees, many of whom feel disconnected from their communities and unsure of where they belong. Together, they explore the relationship between belonging and contribution, the importance of rites of passage and meaningful relationships, and the ways our political divisions can obscure the complexity of people's lives. Along the way, Sam challenges Daniel to think more deeply about potentialism and what it would take to build a society where everyone has the opportunity to discover their gifts, contribute to something bigger than themselves, and know they're needed.

Resources:

• Nobody to Call
• Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life
• Connective Tissue newsletter
• Sam Pressler's projects
• More in Common
• Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape — the research behind the term "Exhausted Majority."
• The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy — Christopher Lasch's critique of the growing separation between educated elites and the rest of society.
• Democracy's Discontent — Michael Sandel's book about citizenship, community, and American democracy.
• Rob Henderson and luxury beliefs — The concept Sam references when discussing family and social class.
• After Virtue — Alasdair MacIntyre — Daniel mentioned MacIntyre in the conversation about life as a narrative quest.

In this final episode of the miniseries, Tristan and Rashid step back to reflect on what seven episodes of storytelling from Cape Town have revealed. They revisit the arc of the series, from grounding ourselves in our bodies with Bongeka and Aphiwe, to the critical hope of Ashley and Helene, the courage of Ncedisa, the radical imagination of Leila, and the belonging found at Charlie and Barry’s dinner table.

They explore the power and danger of stories, drawing on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “the danger of a single story” and James Cone’s call for a global analysis of liberation. They ask what it means to tell stories from the Global South without claiming to speak for it, and challenge the ways resources and power are still gate-kept by those claiming to want change. The episode opens and closes with collectively written poems on the role of stories in making a new world.

THEMES

Reflection. The danger of a single story. Global South and Global North. Collective liberation. Interrogating our own narratives. Stories as world-making. Power and resources. Invitation to the listener.

FEATURED VOICES

Tristan Pringle is a life and executive coach, facilitator, and poet based in Cape Town.

Rashid Adams is a musician, songwriter, music producer, and ethnomusicologist based in Cape Town.

CREDITS

| Produced by | Rashid Epstein Adams
| Music by | Rashid Epstein Adams (AKA Arkenstone) and Pursuit
| A collaboration between | The Common Good Podcast & The Liminal Space Podcast

LINKS

| Podcast | linktr.ee/theliminalspacepod
| Substack | theliminalspacepodcast.substack.com
| Instagram | @theliminalspacepod

What if the most radical thing you could do is invite someone to sit at a table with no queue, no power dynamic, and a really good meal? In this episode, Tristan and Rashid introduce two unlikely friends: Charlton Alexander, a tour guide and facilitator who invites people to connect with the city and its stories, and Barry Lewis, an architect from the UK who has spent decades building sandbag homes alongside communities in Cape Town’s townships.

Through a clip from the original Liminal Space episode, Charlie and Barry speak about a community dinner in Muizenberg where there is no queue, where people keep coming back not for the food but for the contact time, and where the questions being asked go far beyond “how do we feed hungry people?” Barry challenges us to throw out the lazy questions that aren’t generating anything new, and Charlie reframes homelessness by pointing out that people living on the streets do have a home, they just don’t have a house. Tristan and Rashid then reflect on what it means to create spaces of belonging and how that might change a neighborhood, a city, and eventually a world.

THEMES

Community dinners. No queue, no power dynamic. Belonging through a meal. Lazy questions. Houselessness vs homelessness. Contact time. Friendship across difference. Creating spaces of belonging.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE

This episode features clips from The Liminal Space Season 1, Episode 5: Kinship, Assimilation and Making Home in the Colonial City with Charlton Alexander and Barry Lewis. The full conversation is available on all podcast platforms.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

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Watch on YouTube

FEATURED VOICES

Charlton Alexander is a tour guide and facilitator based in Cape Town. He invites guests to the city to connect with the people and land in experiences that are life altering.

Barry Lewis is the director of UBU (Ubuhle Bakha Ubuhle / Beauty Builds Beauty), a company focused on developing the technology of sandbag housing in low-income communities in South Africa.

Tristan Pringle is a life and executive coach, facilitator, and poet based in Cape Town.

Rashid Adams is a musician, songwriter, music producer, and ethnomusicologist based in Cape Town.

CREDITS

| Produced by | Rashid Epstein Adams
| Music by | Rashid Epstein Adams (AKA Arkenstone) and Pursuit
| A collaboration between | The Common Good Podcast & The Liminal Space Podcast

LINKS

| Podcast | linktr.ee/theliminalspacepod
| Substack | theliminalspacepodcast.substack.com
| Instagram | @theliminalspacepod