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 test-taking, but this achievement rarely translates into clarity about their lives, their world, or their future.
For twenty years, our 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 placed high school science within the larger story of the universe. The results were striking: when students understood themselves as part of an unfolding cosmos, their love of learning reignited and their capacity for care and curiosity 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?
To meet the future, schools must now shift from delivering information to cultivating wisdom. Students must be taught 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.
A Personal Note from Our Founder, Ari Makridakis
From an early age, I sensed that the scientific story I had inherited about the meaning of life was too small. If human consciousness is just a strange accident in an otherwise senseless cosmos, what meaning is there to our personal experiences of longing, care, and inspiration? And what meaning is there to humanity’s presence on this planet?
Searching for alternative stories – ones that are both scientifically robust and also existentially nourishing – has formed the backbone of my life’s journey. After graduating from Amherst College in 1996, I moved out to California and threw myself into the study of philosophy and world religions. I also spent two formative years at the San Francisco Art Institute, learning how to follow the trail of creative inspiration.
At the same time, I began tutoring students in every branch of middle and high school science and math. For nearly twenty years, I taught biology, chemistry, physics, geometry, algebra, and calculus week after week. That work gave me a rare intimacy with the scientific worldview and an equally intimate view of how fragmented — and deadening — mainstream education had become.
Over time, my studies led me toward an alternative orientation—one rooted in the recognition that we live inside a creative, emergent universe, and that human beings are participants in its unfolding. It eventually carried me to the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I completed a PhD in philosophy and cosmology under the mentorship of Brian Swimme.
This understanding reshaped how I approached both learning and teaching. In recent years, I have seen again and again that young people come alive when they discover their own role in the world’s ongoing creativity. When students feel themselves as part of an intelligent, creative universe, their fascination ignites effortlessly.
Having completed my doctorate last year, I am now thrilled to be launching a new educational offering devoted to helping young people orient themselves within this radically uncertain moment in history—cultivating wisdom, agency, and a lived relationship with an unfinished cosmos.
Our Other Core Faculty Members
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.
“As a parent, and speaking on behalf of my three grown children, we all couldn’t have been more pleased with all the results we achieved with Ari. Ari is blessed with a gift of teaching and patience to ensure that each child feels confident and understands the material before leaving the session. Ari is unbelievable and amazing to all us parents as he can teach any subject at any level. Ari does this graciously with a warm, calm smile that puts students and parents at ease during hectic times.”
Denise • Parent
“What makes Ari particularly unique is his ability to share with his students the broader impact of the material they are learning. His enthusiasm for learning and his devotion to the success of his students is very evident, making every session worthwhile and incredibly enjoyable.”
Sarah • Student for 3 years
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.