1 Johnnie's Phoric

The Phoric* is an idea Rob Paterson and I have hatched.  We plan to do a series of podcast interviews with people who interest us.  We'll ask each of them to choose three video clips (YouTubes or whatever) that in some way excite and please them, and tell us what they mean to them.

So we thought we'd start with each other's selection, and then take it from there.

Here's our first podcast

And here are the three clips that I chose, all of them from Monty Python... I'd love to run a management course based around lessons from Monty Python.  Python captures the absurd in how we humans organise ourselves.  The first clip, from Life of Brian, mocks those conversations about the importance of action which remain mired in abstraction and inaction.   

In the second, we see Michael Palin as an apparently archetypal army seargent-major, proposing some meaningless "marching hup and down the square" to some squaddies. For me, this is about us not really wanting to do many of the things we pretend to.

Finally, I choose the "follow the gourd" scene, also from Life of Brian. This captures how easy it is to mistakenly read deep significance into accidental events and how we create leaders in our imaginations, where in reality there is only chaos.

*The idea for 'phoric is as in metaphoric, and euphoric... or maybe another phoric you might think of.