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, 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 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?
We believe that 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.
A Personal Note from Our Founder, Ari Makridakis
I have been on a lifelong search for a meaningful orientation to life. From an early age, I carried a persistent feeling that the stories I had inherited about what life is for were too small to hold the depth of human longing or the complexity of the world itself. They felt constricting in my own life and inadequate for the challenges we face together as a species. That intuition became the thread I followed, again and again, across disciplines, practices, and decades.
After graduating from Amherst College in 1996, I continued that search through art, science, and philosophy. I spent two formative years at art school in the late 1990s, learning to think with images, materials, and form. 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 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. This understanding reshaped how I approached both learning and teaching. 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.
I have also tried to live this orientation, not just study it. Since my early twenties, creative work has been central to my life. My twenties were devoted to drawing and painting; my thirties to interactive digital art designed to awaken creative agency in others. For many years, I collaborated with an electronic musician on improvised video performances, sharing that work with audiences across the country. Creativity, for me, has always been a way of listening to the deeper currents moving through the world.
Teaching became the place where everything converged. I saw again and again that young people come alive when education helps them sense their own role in the world’s ongoing creativity. Watching students struggle to find meaning within conventional schooling led me, in 2020, to found YourCosmos. Since then, I have watched hundreds of students rediscover their love of learning and their sense of belonging within a wondrous universe.
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.