Are We Just Twits Having Fun in the Château? Parties, Philosophy, and the Sonic Sphere
Details
- Interviewee: Ed Cooke
- Role: Co-founder, husband of Jess, Feytopian
- Community: Feÿtopia
- Location: chateau du fey
- Date: 2026-05-01
- Language: English
Summary
Ed Cooke is a British tech entrepreneur and Jess's husband, living at Château de Fey for half the year. His predilection for bringing people together in creative community predates Feÿtopia, expressed through the Thinking Garden, a series of two-week pop-up communes he ran for 32 people with silent mornings and no internet.
During lockdown he co-created the Reality Collective, a community for massively multiplayer online parties. The people who could co-create those events, he describes, are performance art characters who use costume, narrative, and imagination to tweak the experience of reality. That thread runs through Feÿtopia's parties.
His deepest intellectual investment is in parties as an art form. From weddings to raves to the rituals at Fey, he sees them as a great unacknowledged art form through which people perceive the world differently. The Sonic Sphere is his own example: a Sunday afternoon experiment in immersive sound that became an international project, seeded by Feÿtopia introductions to Tesla engineers and other collaborators.
The tension he holds: is Feÿtopia a bunch of twits having fun in a château, or does the creative output justify the indulgence? His answer circles between the value of being and the necessity of downstream effects. He names the diversity gap as his main regret: Nigerian friends from the online party days cannot get visas to come.
Key quotes
I do think we would be a bunch of chaps in the chateau having fun, and should probably be doing something useful in the world, if the result of this methodology isn't some cool ideas, production, and benefits for the people who come.
A Sunday afternoon exploration on what immersive sound could be led to a massive international project. With a bit of luck, hundreds of towns may have sonic community spaces.
No matter how powerful or serious or clever or busy a person is, they can't resist having a bit of poetry and imagination brought into their experience of the everyday.
Dishwashing is this crucial function in any commune. Turning that from guilt to a joyful opportunity is a great way of policing the space.
Transcript
---
interviewee: Ed Cooke
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
related_people:
- Jess (Jessica Flor Angel, wife and founder of Feytopia)
themes:
- Values
- Community
- Creativity
- Ritual
- Imagination
- Belonging
notes: |
Heavily cleaned from ASR-generated raw transcript. Speakers reconstructed.
Ed is Jess's husband; co-founder of community life at Château de Fey.
Names flagged with [name uncertain in source] need verification before publication.
Ed spoke in long meandering thoughts with frequent self-corrections; cleaning
tightened these without altering substance.
---
# Interview Transcript: Ed Cooke
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytopia
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham
---
**Sharon:** So let's start with your name and where we're sitting right now.
**Ed:** My name's Ed Cooke, and we are sitting in my office, which is at my wife's place, Château de Fey, where Feytopia takes place for half of the year.
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**Sharon:** And what role does Feytopia play in your life?
**Ed:** Well, it is my home for half the year. From the bosom of this place I try to do my things. I have a life like anybody else, projects and so on, but with this as the backdrop, and in many ways the nurturing inspiration for much that I'm interested in.
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**Sharon:** Can you tell me, from your eyes, the journey? Because you've been here from before, from before Covid. How has this place evolved through your life?
**Ed:** Well, I guess my sensibility, my predilection for a space like this, has a long history. I say this in the context that it almost feels like a coincidence that it happens to be my wife's abiding passion to bring people together in community. But I had an impulsive enthusiasm for bringing people together in fun, especially intellectual coming together, for a bunch of time before Feytopia.
For example, I used to run this thing called the Thinking Garden, which is a two week pop up commune. I'd get the 32 people I know, two weeks, turn off the internet, silence in the mornings, everyone working on things that they don't do in everyday life. A pause in normal reality, where you don't have to be a lawyer or a philosopher or a scientist, you can just do the other thing which is in yourself.
That was very magical. Three Thinking Gardens. The third one was at Jess's, and the second one too. In my own journey it was a precursor, and I think of Feytopia, or some aspects of it, as a more extended Thinking Garden. A bundle of incredibly fascinating people having the opportunity to not be on the game of being themselves, to remove the mask and interact in a more fulsome, interesting way than is normally easy in everyday life.
It's funny, I just remember after I did this peace conference all those years ago, I don't remember who I talked with about this place. I was like, oh, what's Jess up to? And yeah, she's hosting these philosophical debates in the chateau now. Maybe it was last year that I really understood what's happening here, what Feytopia is all about.
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**Sharon:** I wonder, because when we talked, when we did this day of visioning, people said there was quite a lot of overlap between the Thinking Gardens and Jess's gang when you just started gathering here. So I wonder what kind of values led you to all these kinds of spaces?
**Ed:** Yeah. In the visioning day, we asked the question, where did you come from? Who brought you here? It was interesting. The people who intersect with my life, basically before or at least outside of Feytopia, a bunch of them were from online parties.
During the lockdown, we organized lots of online parties in this crazy community called the Reality Collective. Basically they were massively multiplayer participative online celebrations, staggeringly good parties. I'm a connoisseur. I love parties for quite deep reasons, I think, and I would never have predicted the extent to which it was possible to have an epic party online.
The kinds of people who were capable of co-creating that were performance art characters. People used to curating and designing experiences, using costume and narrative and space and imagination to tweak the experience of reality, to treat the everyday into new, playful, fun things. There's a big streak of that here, among all these random other pockets of people.
That's one of the fun things about Feytopia. It's very plural. It's organic. People come here and the friends who resonate with their personal interest in coming end up here through an elaborate two way negotiation. So you have this inherent diversity. The performance theater thing is a really good thread, because no matter how powerful or serious or clever or busy a person is, they can't resist having a bit of poetry and imagination brought into their experience of the everyday. It brings them out of their shell and makes the act of life a delight.
You ask me what values I brought. One is definitely radical open mindedness, and different ways of thinking about the basic features of life. Friendship. What is a home. What is work versus play.
For me the secret of these things began when I was studying ancient Greek at school. I had a really amazing ancient Greek teacher. We visited him on our honeymoon, which is quite strange, to go see a schoolmaster on our honeymoon, but he ended up living in Greece. He was someone whose love of the words, of the language, of the people, of the culture, came through in everything. He talked about Plato's Academy and the seven schools of philosophy in ancient Athens, and the idea that these were often things like gardens.
It became very apparent to me how odd adults behaved. I was around my parents' friends and so on, and it was very unclear to me why adults were so boring. They talked a lot about worrying about their children's education or school fees or mortgages. They saw their friends quite rarely. The parties were quite muted.
I had that experience back home in childhood too. Similarly at university, I saw lots of my friends, brilliant people with a spark of imagination, make these very eccentric career decisions, for example becoming a lawyer. It's obvious what happens. Yes, you're using your mind, but you become inherently part of a zero sum game. Your competence as a lawyer beyond a certain point just increases adversarially. There didn't seem to be any merit in spending life that way. You could see what happened to their souls. Anyone who's been a lawyer over the age of 30, there's no longer the sparkle of spontaneity and rich attention.
These are example anecdotes. I don't really present them as arguments, more just observations from my experience. But I was like, well, obviously it's super cool to actually live in a philosophical commune. The version I had, I had a hippie housemate do a drawing of it, and we put it up in the bathroom of the home we were sharing. It was like a permanent version of the Thinking Garden. A kind of Greek island. There's a pavilion where poets lived, and one where philosophers lived, and a space in the middle where people came together.
Geometrically Feytopia is quite similar. You've got the central space where everyone gathers, and then pocketed around in different rooms and random places is this great diversity of characters.
There are so many different ways of describing it. One I quite like is that it's a more efficient design for human interrelation. If I live in a city, okay, cool, I live in a city. I can go to a jazz night, I can go to this cool restaurant, I can go to this book club where I meet interesting people, the library is over here, blah blah blah. Okay, it's a rich, diverse, interesting cultural life, but not just cultural, also exercise, there's gyms. Feytopia compresses an amazing city into something where it takes one minute to walk between any of these things. And in that space is a bit of a festival. An ongoing festival, which is continually, incredibly capital efficient. Life to co-create, absorb, give. It can be capital efficient because you just pay room and board and it's there.
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**Sharon:** What do you think is the difference between you and someone who comes here and books a room for the season? I assume it lands a bit differently for you. And there's also a different scale element to it.
**Ed:** Yeah. I suppose it's worth mentioning that I have, in a way, a kind of guarded relationship to Feytopia. The love is quite continuous, but I have projects which for me at least are ambitious and demanding of huge amounts of emotional and physical and mental energy. Sometimes I just want to be in a bubble thinking about the thing, go get the food, not talk to anybody, come back. So I'm always having to calibrate the degree to which I'm vulnerable to the magic of Feytopia.
Having a baby is quite fun, because I'm not a natural wander around the grounds kind of person. But with the baby, you can just walk around. You can think of it as an interactive, organic art piece. You run around. There are the people, this and that, a couple of people on a slack line, someone playing guitar, a yoga meditation circle. Tony's outside his van on his laptop working on things, and someone's hacking on stuff. You can always see it as a slideshow or montage of things without having to interact.
Going back to your question, if I could come here for two weeks I'd love to have that experience. I'd love to come and go all in, which I don't do. If I won the lottery, this morning someone said, hey, we're going to swim in the river, and I was like, no thanks. Hey, we're doing this thing, and any of all this fun stuff which I'd love to do if time were infinite. I have to calibrate.
I used to be more all in. It's changed. There have been periods where I was more on. I played a role in helping initiate various things. The Greek Gods and Goddesses Gym was, for a while, an obsession of mine. During the lockdown we had nowhere to go, so we began chipping in together to put together what began as a super rudimentary gym and ended up being a quite comprehensive community gym. It has this great culture which is difficult to put one's finger on. It's called the Greek Gods and Goddesses Gym. It's inherently mischievous and inclusive. It's self elected who's coaching the GTG. Everyone exercises together at noon. Someone who's really into Pilates, or super strength training, or a former marine, or something between running and dance brings their flavor of it. It's a group workout together.
It turns out you can be a professional rugby player, pull out a machine, and go, why do these muscles not exist? There's no universal human body. Everyone has nothing in common in that way. So it's a very powerful community movement because people get to share at different levels.
This is something I proudly kicked off. I used to feel a deep sense of responsibility for it. Especially at the change of the season, in January, February, I'm often like, okay guys, noon, here's some AI generated Greeks in a gym working out. The reason I'm doing that is to give it momentum. But the momentum is there. Okay, I can get on with my day.
The other thing is that Feytopia is very much Jess's project in terms of inception and carrying it forward in a fundamental way. But I do have, by dint of the relationship, and also by dint of being here since the beginning, some role in co-creating the vibe a little bit more than the actual infrastructure or place or vision.
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**Sharon:** I remember, I don't remember the context, but you said something along the line of, are we just a bunch of twits having fun in the chateau? And you were saying a little bit about the philosophy behind parties.
I also organize festivals. For many years in my 20s, in my transition between doing a burn with a bunch of tech people from Tel Aviv, and transitioning into activism, I ended up doing the same thing in activism, organizing festivals, but now for peace activists. Being in these places, I also have this voice. Is this just a fancy social club? I wonder what you have to say about that, and on your philosophy, and where the tension is for you.
**Ed:** Yeah. Maybe beginning with parties. My binding, deepest fascination is with parties, because I feel they are, for me maybe, but I think perhaps more generally, this great unacknowledged art form that is incredibly important to human life. Between weddings, festivals, funerals, raves, birthday parties, drinks in the park with a couple of buddies, road trips. All of these social activities where you pause time a little bit and you're not doing your job, and you come together, and you leverage art and architecture and music and dance and conversation and food and many other things to create spaces where people perceive the world differently.
I'm always amazed. The higher up I've gone in inspecting human society, the more vividly I see the parties. Burning Man, it's the people who run the world, the great Californian tech elite along with 68,000 other randoms, voluntarily there to create and give, who participatively invent another world in which to connect and understand the meaning of their lives. This is very important stuff. Parties have a huge role in culture and politics.
At Feytopia there's almost a collective party technique that's been developed for the weekends, mainly, where we co-create experiences that are interesting and develop spaces for conversation and connection and ideas and collaborations.
The tension is, does it work? Lots of things feel really nice. You sit around in a circle holding hands, going, and you feel seen and connected, and then it results in nothing happening. It's a semantic indulgence. It's very easy to experience the pain of the animals and think that by experiencing the pain of the animals, you've helped the animals. Now, it may be a helpful precursor, but just thinking about it and experiencing it doesn't change anything.
I do think we would be a bunch of chats in the chateau having fun, we should probably be doing something useful in the world, if the result of this methodology isn't some cool ideas, production, and benefits for the people who come. It doesn't necessarily have to be great works of art. People often come here and say, I've healed my wounds, I connected with the LA, and that's an incredible thing if true. I'm not infinite. But you can also have the experience of, I've been working on my emotions, and it's opened up a box which is an infinite amount of work, where that work may bring things into consciousness but doesn't actually change the direction of a life or an idea.
---
**Sharon:** And what's the tension? When is it like, this is just a bunch of people exercising their wealth and free time and not really doing anything? And when does it feel like, okay, we are onto something?
**Ed:** Yeah. A time where there's a bunch of people around the swimming pool on Sunday afternoon, sunbathing, somebody's playing guitar and chatting. They're not doing anything. It's obviously a great time, but by itself it feels like people enjoying their wealth, the wealth of opportunity or freedom from other things. Even though, by the way, Feytopia is inexpensive. People spend across the entirety of their existence here something equivalent to someone who has gone to London. It's not financial privilege necessarily, but it is experimental privilege.
If there was only that, you'd worry. But when people get together on creative projects spontaneously, for example the AI radio. People at the very frontier of what you can do with an emerging technology that's going to change the world, with elite skills, who could be building $100 million startups, are playfully exploring the meaning of living with AI and building something which gets gifted to the community. This is Poli's AI radio, basically. It reads the signal group, reads the bookings, reads the temperature in the sauna, reads everything, and there's enough context about everyone in the community to commentate on daily affairs, announce things, and so on. This is avant garde invention as a planet. Often the conversation is at that level.
The Sonic Sphere would be the example most intimate to me, where a Sunday afternoon exploration on what immersive sound could be led to a massive international project. With a bit of luck, hundreds of towns may have sonic community spaces, woven into urban architecture, spaces for singing or differently communicating and understanding things.
My embarrassment about this theory is that it's utilitarian. What are the results? Show me the KPIs. Okay, it's good if a book that someone comes here to write is good, but if the book is bad then it's not good. That doesn't seem right for what this community is, because it's actually not really about doing, it's about being.
But I think the dignity of that experience of being depends on the downstream effects, of being people, doing things, the world evolving in some way.
My teenage self would be disappointed with me, because to his mind, jobs and monetary ambition and classical status games, and the way people live, was just obviously dumb. A complete failure of human civilization to produce the epic forms of life which are clearly possible, and to exchange them for a dutiful kowtowing to an almost thermodynamic process of what society happens to do.
---
**Sharon:** What do you say about the role rituals play here, and also over time?
**Ed:** Some of the rituals we have are things like disco dishwashing, the Greek Gods and Goddesses Gym. Washing for dinner, the community meeting. Some of those.
Why is that interesting? Well, it's a bit like the architectural structure of the space time of the week, and how that gets imprinted into social norms.
Dishwashing is this crucial function in any commune, because any person uses like nine plates a day. If you've got 30 people, you've got 270 plates and forks and spoons and cups and knives. For functional reasons, having a good washing up system is really good. Turning that from guilt to a joyful opportunity is a great way of policing the space. It's sort of like propaganda, I guess. But it also so happens that that's one of the special experiences you have here, because, I love that space especially, when someone's joining the community, if they've been here for ten days I've said hello a couple of times, and then you end up washing up with them and it's like a drive. You're not looking each other in the eyes, you're not under the pressure of let's extract information, you're just playfully bouncing around the space, washing things, putting things into the dryer. That often unlocks very rich, deep, interesting conversations and connections, in a similar way actually that a long walk with a group of people does, because you can't really walk with three people in a row, only two works for the human gait. So everyone splits into pairs, and the pairs are somewhat random, so you get quality, high attention time with individuals.
That's an example of a ritual. GTG is demographic and leveling. I love picking up heavy objects, and I think my mind without GTG begins to migrate towards thinking strength training is the only dignified form of embodiment. GTG is this delightful opening up of one's conception of what it is to be embodied in a healthy way, a great opportunity to learn things.
It creates common reference points and common spaces where everyone can inject their own energy. That's probably the thing.
Other rituals are things like birthday parties, and the waking up crew. I haven't been on one of these, but there are people who do wake ups, theatrical experiences which people request.
---
**Sharon:** What's one inspiring form of collaboration that you've witnessed here or experienced?
**Ed:** One example. We did a party about three years ago. The theme of the party was ChatGPT [AI tool name uncertain in source], and it was very shortly after the release. It was a kind of avant garde creative exploration of the nature of AI. Someone built a thing that spoke to you, and there was a plot. It put together AI researchers and the natural bounty of party talent that we have in the building to create an immersive experience, which is almost like one of those books that stays with you. It was a playful, transient, ephemeral thing that created a deep philosophical examination of what's happening with AI. That's one example.
Last night was quite funny. You were filming. There was a very elaborate lightsaber being carried above a dinner party of animals in a kind of wacky Mad Hatter's dinner party piece of performance theater. That's fun from the ephemeral angle, because it's people doing improbably committed things to have an interesting time.
A previous Planta is maybe a great example. The speaking plant, with this elaborate history. Late at night, a bunch of very talented engineers have been hacking away by the fire, exploring the avant garde of when AI infuses objects. What does that mean? If your plant can speak to you, having conversations is the possibility.
My own journey with Sonic Sphere is like a pure Feytopia thing. I built it with ten people in the garden, and then I carried on with it. As we escalated the project, random introductions from Feytopia, for example to a bunch of Tesla engineers who had incredible technical capabilities, who joined the project and built this epic lighting system, escalated it and escalated it. It was this continual brush with serendipity, the idea getting spread enough to recruit fun, talented individuals who amplify the ideas. Long before something becomes commercial, it can sometimes have a long journey of development that's only possible in community.
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**Sharon:** Are there any practices you tried to implement here as a community, and they got abandoned, that you can recall?
**Ed:** Yeah. I often tried to change the time of GTG from noon to 5 PM. 5 PM intended to be the perfect time, given someone's working in California, and 11 AM is too early to get up if you're, you know, a degenerate. All these constraints, which mean the only time we've been able to settle on is noon, despite vivid efforts to move to 5 PM.
There's a constant bubble of creative coming together, only some of which escalate to being rituals. There's a book club, a listening club, a meditation club. People love to create these subfactions, sort of organized attention, which often doesn't become a permanent feature, just a passing curiosity.
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**Sharon:** What do you think the seasonal structure of Feytopia makes possible, and what does it prevent?
**Ed:** Right. We're open for whatever, five, six months a year. What it makes possible is that it freshens the place every year. It's almost like a weekend. From the past week, things have time to die down and disappear. It's a cleansing process. It forces everyone to have a life outside, which means there's no dependence. Everybody benefits. It's almost like the radical self-reliance of Burning Man.
What it prevents, for me the big tension is, when should I get the work done? This is particularly for me because I just happen to be here. If I was coming here for two weeks I'd worry about it a lot less.
If there was more year round Feytopia, it would be a bit more chill, a bit more spacious, a bit deeper, for long term collaboration and work.
The other thing it prevents, it's kind of annoying for people who have to come in and out, including me in a sense. It would be quite sweet just to settle in, make no further plans.
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**Sharon:** Do you think there are any questions that this community avoids?
**Ed:** I couldn't possibly say. Something that can be public. Which area of avoidance is not so avoidant that I could let pass my lips?
I mean, the framing of the question is dramatic, in the sense that probably hundreds of millions of things, the bias of your attention, if you gave it to everything, one of the things is the world this community could be obsessed with and asking questions about. You're never going to be asking all the questions.
Maybe I'll say. The one thing is, Feytopia is in some sense extremely diverse, but it's drawn from the repertoire of countries that we know, and subsets of those countries that we know. I had Nigerian friends from my online party days, a super cool bunch of dancers and performance artists, and it's difficult to impossible for them to be here for a whole suite of reasons. There's the visa aspect, the financial aspect. They'd need to be sponsored, can't afford to pay a London rent coming from Lagos. That's a shame, because the nature of the place is to be diverse, but we're actually only diverse on certain dimensions.
I think Jess might have some wisdom about that, which is that there needs to be enough alignment or mutual resonance or mutual comprehensibility for trust, for vulnerability, to flow. But yeah, that's a regret from me. I wish it was a bit more wildly diverse and open.
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**Sharon:** What question would spark that within the community?
**Ed:** It's actually not really a question that's chatted about in various forms. Not all people in the community are very successful or wealthy in the outside world. Many not at all. There isn't a notion of communal, I mean, the whole thing is implicitly communal, but, should there literally be scholarships funded by everyone who comes here who can afford it, for example. I'm not sure. I don't know if in this case it's a question like, why are we so white, for example. I wouldn't ask it like that.
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**Sharon:** Okay. For the closing question, how did this place change or affect your life?
**Ed:** I sometimes wonder, what the fuck am I doing? I used to be a British tech entrepreneur. How did it affect my life?
Well, it's definitely made raising a child extremely fun. That's a micro example. My life has changed in the repertoire of ideas and people, the pattern of life has become dramatically richer. Although dramatically in Burgundy, you know, versus in London, there's a tradeoff for sure.
It was very causally responsible for Sonic Sphere taking off as a thing. It's a continuous inspiration for another one of my projects, which is a learning app I'm very excited by, which has connections with some of the AI experiments done by the techies here.
I sometimes think of myself, but as Denis Thatcher, the much mocked and beloved husband of Margaret Thatcher, who was almost an object of comedy. The experience of, through association, having signed up to live a particular kind of life, I feel a lot of tender love for almost every single person who comes. A lot of very deep friendships. But I can also imagine having had a totally different life, and it being fine.
In the end, it comes back to a question of, okay, Feytopia has expanded my exposure to a broader realm of human empathy and connection and different ideas, but is it just me being a fat in a French chateau, or am I actually doing anything useful with it?
It has given me a unique opportunity to study parties. I really have, since about the age of 25, been tinkering away with my theory of parties. If I fail to write my theory of parties, then effectively I went fishing, fishing and experiencing, and I found this incredible shoal of gorgeous, rare fish the world's never seen. But in the metaphor this is the idea as the book. If they just swim away in the ocean of consciousness, and I haven't translated them into an artifact that can extend beyond the walls and the bounded experience of living in community, it's kind of, pull yourself together.
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**Sharon:** Anything else you want to say to close?
**Ed:** I think, sometimes I read the histories of technologies and stuff, and there's an absurdly small number of people tinkering with the thing that turns out to be the great revolution. Why were only like 100 people seriously interested in neural networks in the whole of humanity in the 90s? It's not very long ago. If you're studying science, it's kind of obvious how it worked.
I do think there's a small but delightful judge that has this importance of defining or innovating in the ways people can live together, in a fashion that may become quite widespread in future times. I'm thinking of post AI abundance a bit, where the performance of professional drudgery is revealed as the thing it is. If you're doing the job of a product manager or an accountant, just working the gig.
I'm intrigued whether things like Feytopia, there might be say 250,000 spaces around Europe, generated and run by communities of people, that it might become a normal modality of human architecture. Which I think is where Jess began with the project, just studying architecture. Why is every house in the world shit? Basically, every single object you need to live in is in boxes, which are strategically designed to isolate people from doing the things they love to do the most, which is generally chatting with other people.
For Jess, I'll caveat this in the sense that you can listen to her talk about it before deciding this is what she thinks, but for her there was a sort of, this is one of those ones where everyone's being stupid and pretending there wasn't a choice here. I think there is actually a kind of world where 30% or 20% or 10% of society had the option of living in places like this. Because a thousand people have probably flowed through Feytopia, even if there are only 30 people at a time, it's quite a still instrument of dealing out open mindedness. It's like a car wash where you come in and become more open minded going in.
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**Sharon:** Yeah, definitely. And it is getting bigger. That's what I'm documenting.