Alasdair Lord was born and grew up in York, England and first became interested in human socio-economic and political organisation as a teenager. After working as a factory labourer in Holland in 1992 he attended the University of Portsmouth from 1992-1996 and graduated with a BA (Hons) in Latin American Studies. During this time he spent a year studying in Mexico and witnessed first hand the Zapatista uprising in San Cristobal de Las Casas, New Year’s Day 1994. After graduating with a 2:1 (and a first in his dissertation) in 1996 he became an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher and has subsequently lived and worked for almost nine years in Thailand, four years in Oman, two and a half years in Saudi Arabia and a year in Spain as a language teacher. He has also worked at a number of language schools in York teaching mixed nationality groups of teenagers and adults, and business-people one-to-one. He has also taught academic English to Chinese students, both online and in person, at Loughborough University, University of York, Lancaster University and the University of Nottingham.
He graduated with an MSc in Water and Environmental Management from the Water Engineering Development Centre (WEDC), based at Loughborough University, in 2003. During his time living in Thailand he was the Education for Sustainable Development Coordinator for the British Council (Thailand), co-writing a text book on climate change for Thai high school teachers and delivering a paper at the 10th UNESCO-APEID conference, Learning Together; Education for Sustainable Development, in Bangkok in December 2006. While living in Thailand he also survived the Asian Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 and the devastating flooding of 2011 in Ayutthaya.
He first encountered the teachings of the Buddha at York Sixth Form College aged seventeen and eventually took refuge in the Thai forest monk tradition in northern Thailand in 2012. He is a practicing Buddhist and politically he considers himself a Postcapitalist. He speaks fluent Spanish and Thai and a little French. On YouTube he posts videos as The Renaissance Yorkshireman Podcast. He currently works as a supply supervisor in state secondary schools, and as a supply teaching assistant for special educational needs children in a variety of York secondary and primary schools. He lives in England and has one adult daughter. In 2023 he published Postcapitalism: An Alternative to the ‘Great reset’, which is the updated version of the book he first started writing in 2013.