Zoe Weil

If you're building a RAG system, a co-pilot, or an agent, you may be making the same bet.

Zoe Weil's answer, at least in retail, is to look between the clicks.

The company she co-founded and leads, Sequin, is built on signals most systems ignore, how long a shopper hesitates, how fast they scroll, and how many times they go back and forth between two products before adding one to the cart.

And it judges the results not by what people click, but by what they buy.

It also becomes clear that having an open mind, being curious, being willing to discuss our thoughts with others, and ultimately feeling motivated to act on our insights works best.

But what, at a deeper level, do we most need to learn? Zoe Weil, an American educator who co-founded the Institute for Humane Education, took her childhood fascination with the television series Star Trek and its powerful underlying utopian message and made it her life's work to focus on how innovative processes in schooling, something we've all gone through, can become a process that turns us all into what she calls a solutionary.

A solutionary, she says, is someone who, quote, "identifies inhumane, unjust, and unsustainable societal systems, and then develops solutions to transform them so that they do the most good and least harm for people, animals, and the environment." Unlike, say, a problem-solver or a humanitarian who respectively try to solve a specific problem or correct a social injustice, a solutionary, quote, "focuses on changing the systems that cause and/or contribute to a problem in the first place.

A solutionary tries to solve problems so they cease to exist." Now, there's an excellent TED Talk for listeners, uh, available, uh, that Zoe Weil did, and, uh, her name is, last name is W-E-I-L, and her first name is Z-O-E.

Now, when I first came in contact with today's guest, I learned this term from her and in my sublime ignorance thought it was just a made-up word because her first language is Czech, and like a stereotypical male, I blithely shared my opinion.

How wrong can one be? Our guest today is Veronika Perkova, a journalist, educator, and feminist activist born and raised and living in the Czech Republic, who has produced, among other things, a series of interviews and podcasts called Nature Solutionaries, in which she talks to people ar- from around the world who are working hard to change systems so they will indeed, quote, "do the most good and the least harm for people, animals, and the environment." But Veronika has done much more than create this series, and today she's going to talk to us about what she's done and why she's done it and what she hopes to do in the future.

And, uh, today we're going to, to branch out with our, our guest, uh, to, to talk about, uh, more than the siloed approach and, and how anything that we do, uh, has an impact, uh, on our planet.

And, uh, so our guest today is Zoe Weil.

She's an educator, she's an author, a longtime leader in humane education.

She's the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education, where, uh, she is focused on helping people understand the connections between human rights, environmental sustainability, animal protection, and the systems that shape our everyday lives.

Hello, everyone, and welcome on this new episode of Education Futures.

Today, I'm very happy to be with Zoe Weil.

Hello, Zoe.

Welcome on the show.