Our Story
After three decades of teaching, we’ve been forced to face an uncomfortable truth: most students find little relevance in what they are taught, and even less meaning. They may excel at exams, but this achievement rarely translates into clarity about their lives, their world, or their future.
For twenty years, founder Ari Makridakis tutored students who could solve complex problems but struggled to explain why their learning mattered. They were mastering content but missing context—the sense of how knowledge connects to life, purpose, and the world’s challenges.
In 2015, Ari founded YourCosmos, an experimental program that wove academic study into the larger story of the universe. The results were striking: when students understood themselves as part of an unfolding cosmos, their curiosity reignited and their capacity for deep thought expanded.
The Seed Pod grows from that insight. Our work is not about test prep or job training—it’s about cultivating wisdom, resilience, and belonging so that young people can navigate an unpredictable future with courage and integrity.
Our Educational Vision
In the face of accelerating change—technological, ecological, cultural—we need to reexamine the core question of education:
What is truly worth passing on to the next generation?
Going forward, schools must shift from delivering information to cultivating wisdom. Students must learn to listen deeply—to themselves, to one another, to Earth, and to the cosmos—and to respond to all of them with care and creativity.
Education must nurture meta-capacities: self-reflection, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, and the ability to see patterns across scales—from personal experience to planetary dynamics.
Reality discloses itself through multiple lenses. We help students integrate scientific rigor, mythic imagination, intuitive insight, and embodied awareness so their whole being can be a source of truth.
Wisdom emerges in dialogue about what truly matters. Our circles are small by design, creating space for authentic conversation, mutual recognition, and collaborative meaning-making.
Meet Our Leadership Team
Ari Makridakis
After graduating from Amherst College in 1996, Ari spent twenty years tutoring students in every branch of middle and high school science and math.
By 2015, he had grown increasingly frustrated with mainstream education, and he began teaching cosmology classes to teens. Since then, he has watched hundreds of students rediscover their love of learning and also their sense of belonging to a wondrous universe.
Ari just received his PhD in Philosophy from CIIS, where he studied with Brian Swimme.
Bree Rosenblum
Bree is a Professor of Global Change Biology at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science. She received her B.A. from Brown University and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.
Bree’s research focuses on understanding the biological diversity of our planet. How are new species formed? Why are species being lost at such an alarming rate today? Bree loves to share her inspiration for studying life on our changing planet with students of all ages.
Ezekiel Fugate
Our Commitments
We believe true learning transforms. The Seed Pod is designed as an initiatory space, where young people cross thresholds—from compliance into authorship, from fragmentation into integration, from passivity into conscious participation.
We believe all young people carry unique seeds of possibility for the future. Our commitment is not to mold them into predetermined shapes, but to create the conditions that allow these irreplaceable gifts to take root and flourish.
We refuse to let students waste their most vital years on work destined for the trash. Every conversation we have is connected to something real: the challenges of our time, the stories we live by, and the future we are seeding together.
Why We Do This Work
Traditional education was built for a stable, predictable world. Today’s young people are facing something radically different: accelerating change, ecological breakdown, AI disruption, and cultural fragmentation.
In this context, schooling can no longer focus on memorized facts or preset paths. It must help students develop the inner resources to adapt, the relational skills to collaborate, and the wisdom to cultivate viable seeds of possibility for the future.
The Seed Pod exists to nurture those seeds—one student and one conversation at a time.
Schedule a Free Consultation
To help you decide if The Seed Pod is right for you, we offer free zoom consultations.
Meet our principal instructor,
Ari Makridakis
After graduating from Amherst College in 1996, I spent almost twenty years tutoring students in every branch of middle and high school science and math. Teaching biology, chemistry, physics, geometry, algebra, and calculus every week for two decades has provided me with unique and powerful teaching tools — now I can easily follow students wherever their curiosity leads, and I can also help them explore the cosmos as one interconnected whole.
Over my years of tutoring, I became increasingly frustrated with our mainstream educational system. At the end of every lesson, I would ask students why they should care about what they had just learned, and it pained me to see them struggle to find a reason. To help young people explore the many fantastically interesting aspects of current science, I founded YourCosmos in 2015. Since then, I’ve watched hundreds of students rediscover their love of learning and also their sense of belonging to a wondrous universe.
To fan the flames of my own fascination, I’ve spent the last five years pursuing a Ph.D. with cosmologist Brian Swimme. I am currently completing my dissertation, which explores what complex natural systems can teach us about the cosmos and humanity’s place within it.
In addition to being a teacher and student, I’m also a visual artist. I attended the San Francisco Art Institute after college, and since then, I’ve ceaselessly created paintings and digital interactive art. Recently, I spent a great deal of time making improvised video art in collaboration with an electronic musician. Together, we’ve played hundreds of shows across the country to audiences as big as 10,000 people. Staying committed to my creative dreams has made me both a more fulfilled person and also a more inspiring teacher — when students feel my passion, it helps them to connect to their own.
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