The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Regenerative Economics: New Economic Paradigms, Living Systems, & Holistic Thinking with John Fullerton

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

(Conversation recorded on October 10th, 2024)    Our modern economic system is designed to maximize financial capital, viewing money as though it were wealth itself. But what would happen if we viewed wealth more holistically, taking into account our natural, social, cultural, and human capital, too?   In this conversation, Nate is joined by unconventional economist John Fullerton to discuss the principles of regenerative economics and the need for shifts in our economic paradigms from reductionist thinking to holistic thinking. Fullerton emphasizes the importance of understanding economies as living systems, advocating for financial and monetary systems that align with the patterns of life.  If regenerative economics represents a societal shift towards sustainability, how does our modern financial system act as a barrier to that shift? If the 'myth of separation' contributes to our current economic problems, what types of radical change are needed to reconcile our values dissonance as our crises deepen and accelerate? Finally, how can we teach ourselves to differentiate between the real economy and the financial economy – and to value the things that genuinely add to human and planetary well-being?   About John Fullerton:  John Fullerton is an unconventional economist, impact investor, writer, and some have said philosopher. Building on and integrating the work of many in the field of ecological economics, he is the architect of Regenerative Economics, first conceived in his 2015 booklet, "Regenerative Capitalism: How Universal Patterns and Principles Will Shape the New Economy." After a successful 20-year career on Wall Street where he was a Managing Director of what he calls "the old JPMorgan," John listened to a persistent inner voice and walked away in 2001 with no plan but many questions. He went on to create The Capital Institute in 2010, which is dedicated to the bold reimagination of economics and finance in service to life. John is also the Chairman of New Day Enterprises, PBC, the co-founder of Grasslands, LLC, and a board member of both the Savory Institute and Stone Acres Farm.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners    

economics is all about maximizing efficiency. And so the pursuit of globalization, you know, on-time inventory, all that is pursuing efficiency at the expense of resiliency. And then you wonder why our supply chains can crater the entire economy because they're super efficient, but not at all resilient. Same with Wall Street. It became super efficient extraction of returns on financial capital, but ended up leaving the system very brittle, which would have collapsed were not for the central banks. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future.

By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. You've probably heard of regenerative agriculture, but have you heard of regenerative economics? Joining me today is John Fullerton, who is an unconventional economist, teacher, writer, and impact investor. After walking away from Wall Street, the belly of the superorganism in 2001, he founded the Capital Institute with a mission to reimagine economics and finance in service of life, which eventually manifested in his programs on regenerative economics and regenerative finance in 2015. Today, John and I discuss what is finance? Is finance something we could have in a post-growth world? Could we have an economy that actually regenerates both for the biosphere and the humans and other organisms that comprise it?

So I should point out, I will take this moment to point out, that we have show notes and references in every episode in conversation, including the Frank. in the YouTube description and on the great simplification.com. So every factual thing that John or I reference in this conversation and any conversation that we've ever had on the Great Simplification are in the show notes. Please take advantage of that because there's a lot of great information in that. With that, please welcome John Fullerton. John Fullerton, great to see you. Good to be with you, Nate.

We have known each other for a long time, but only spoken more recently. You and I have a very similar, well, to the average listener, we have similar backgrounds, though they were quite different, in fact. But we both worked on Wall Street. You were at JP Morgan. I was at Solomon Brothers. And we each decided to leave that track to pursue more meaningful for the times we're alive. work. Can you start, and there's a lot of things I want to talk to you about, can you start by describing what was going on in your life at the time and what was the moment that led you to have

this career shift, change in consciousness and redirecting your skills and intelligence on a different path? Sure. So I worked at what I always called the old J.P. Morgan for like almost 20 years right out of college. And honestly, I had been growing restless for, years there. But it wasn't until the merger with Chase that allowed me to, in a sense, get up and walk away. But the event that really was the beginning of that was a plane ride I took to Asia. And I had a newborn at home and a two-year-old at home. And there was an article on the front page of the New York Times describing Walter Annenberg. generous gift to a number of universities, and essentially he was giving away most of his fortune.

And I had this, like, moment where I decided in that moment, I didn't want to be that guy. I didn't want to work my whole life in order to become a philanthropist and get my name in the front page of the New York Times. And there's a longer, there's more to it than that, but that was the gist of it. That was probably in 1996 or so. But I, but I, you know, It took me until 2001 to muster up the courage to walk away. And what was that like? What was going through your mind at that moment? You know, it was really in the chaos of the merger.

It became very clear that the culture that I had worked in and loved for many years was going to be over. And so it wasn't really a hard decision. The harder decision was to decide that I was done with Wall Street, not not. not just working in that one firm. And I did leave with absolutely no idea what I was going to do, no plan, and decided just to take the summer off and decompress for a while. But I suppose to answer your question, what was going on my mind was just a lot of questions about who I was becoming, what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I was 41, probably midlife crisis kicking in, lots of questions. I mean, there's so many different rabbit holes that you and I could go down. I'm just going to have at least this one. I wonder how, and I think I have an answer to this, but I want your opinion. I wonder how many people on Wall Street and in big business around the world today are having that questioning that you had in 2001 and before. And how many of them are finding their own values. values dissonant with their company or their business or their corporations riding high on the

superorganism and with the economic growth extraction imperative. Do you have a sample size of people that you come in contact with? Have you heard stories like that? What are your thoughts? Well, like you, I'm sure, there's certainly a minority who feel that. way and feel to some degree trapped in the superorganism for very practical reasons if nothing else you know it was it was I would say when I when I left people thought mostly that I was crazy they didn't understand it at all and then when the

financial crisis happened suddenly I had a lot of incoming phone calls and maybe I wasn't so crazy after all but I I I guess I would say I hope people are feeling the dissonance by now. But I don't know again what your perspective on this is, but I'm more surprised how few people are, to be honest. Particularly those that have the financial flexibility to, you know, quote, walk away. Those are the ones that surprised me the most.

Briefly, my experience is there are more people who are in that change of consciousness and it's kind of like a barbell situation. Right. There are some, a lot more that are having that awakening. But on the other end of the barbell, there are the others that using confirmation bias and motivated reasoning and other things, they're actually digging their heels in and rejecting some of the findings of ecological economics and all the things that you and I talk about. So, and that, that's, could be predicted, I suppose.

Because to change, they have to change identity, values, all kinds of things and decisions in their lives. It's one of the most unique periods in human history where a small group of people can have that much excess wealth. And wealth is really the power to influence things because it's all digits and electrons and you can move them in a direction. So it's actually a potentially huge resource if some of those. people have a shift in values like you did? Yeah, well, for sure, that's the, that's kind of the holy grail that I think many of us have been aiming at. And maybe I'll come back to that for a minute, you know, repurposing the surplus,

composting the surplus, literally. But I would also hasten to add, I think there are many, many people, probably the majority of people that are working within the superorganism, which I love that phrase, by the way, in part because it implies it's a living thing. But whether they're working in finance or not in finance, but even people working in finance, there's a lot of good people trying to do what our culture tells them is the right thing to do. And many of them are doing exactly that. So I always hasten to try to not sound like I'm being critical of people. that are that are in the superorganism.

I think that's part of the challenge. I know a lot of people that still work on Wall Street or at Shell or at Exxon that deeply care about the environment and the future and the children and everything. It's just that's their job. So. Yeah. But I will share. You mentioned the, you know, the identity, people's identity are tied up in this.

And I had an experience that maybe I'll share with. with you and your listeners that I think explains this quite well. Not too long after I left Morgan, I had an opportunity to sit down with the head of one of, I just, I'll leave his name out of it, but one of the very big money setter banks. And he had recently retired. And I had an opportunity to share with him my kind of exponential growth on a finite planet doesn't work, you know, diagnosis. And I remember he just,

he put his head down a little like this, and he started shaking his head. And he said, John, it's too big. I can't go there. And what I interpreted that meaning is, you're, you know, he was saying to me,

essentially, you're asking me to let go of my identity that I've just built this career and success on, and I've just sailed off into the sunset, and you're telling me that it's either not viable or worse, unethical, I can't go there. There's a lot of people like that. They're very successful and intelligent and skillful and pro-social.

We've just been paying the wrong prices. Both the source and the sink have not been included in our prices because we've optimized power linked to fossil hydrocarbon and ecosystem damage. So I think lots of things would change if the prices changed and the values and incentives, of course. So after you left Wall Street, there was a period and you eventually landed on your work today, which is regenerative economics. So I am somewhat familiar with regenerative agriculture. Could you compare and contrast and define what the field of regenerative economics is? Sure, Nate, I'd love to. It's always tricky to figure out where to start on this one.

So I guess I would start by saying, I think you and I proceeded down a similar, I guess we should call it initially an intellectual awakening, the limits to growth. For me, reading that soon, probably within a couple years after I left Morgan, was a, you know, the proverbial spear in the chest, because somehow it became simply and immediately obvious that the gig was up and that the game we were all playing physically could not continue. And I remember running around talking to my friends about it, and they had either a, I don't get it, response or a sort of ho-hum response, like too philosophical. And to me, it was just this, like, blaring red light in your face that how could you ignore it? And I remember going up to MIT, and I had a conversation with a Nobel Prize economist about this.

And he basically said, I'm not interested in that. I'm working on, you know, whatever he was working on. So I was shocked. And that introduced me, you know, through that, I got interested in the E.F. Schumacher and then the ecological economics. field and Herman Daly's work and all of his colleagues, Peter Brown, Peter Victor in particular, and he kind of went back to school. I think that work is the foundation of regenerative economics. The simple idea that economics didn't have the limitation of scale embedded in. I remember Herman Daly once said to me, I challenge you to read any neoclassical economics textbook and find the word scale

in the book. And so that's sort of the pathway I went down, which I think is a very similar pathway you went down. And yet my conclusion was if this is the answer, then we're seriously screwed. And I told myself there had to be a way out of this double bind, what I call the double bind of all time. And through a series of...

Why is it a double bind? Well, because what we can't ignore is that exponential growth, whether you're a business or a government, works, at least in the short term. Fortunes have been made and government budgets have been funded. And if you, you know, even sniff of an economic system that is beginning to slow the growth rate, much less shrink, all kinds of bad things happen, beginning with recessions and unemployment. And so we're, you know, to use a financial term, we're leveraged to growth in more ways than we realize. And I think some of the conversation about degrowth and limits to growth kind of ignores that reality, that the system demands it to stay a system. So that's one bind. We've got to keep growing. And then the double bind is that if we keep growing, we'll collapse not only the economy, but the ecology and civilization. as we know it, as you know and have shared so well. So that's the double bind, but I just kept, I'm very much driven by intuition and

by synchronicities, to be honest. That's maybe a longer conversation for another day. But through a synchronicity, I found myself working with a man named Alan Savory. and Alan is the somewhat controversial kind of originator of this concept of holistic plan grazing. Some people refer to it as mob grazing or rotational grazing, which is essentially biomimicry using herbivores on large grasslands to mimic how nature worked. And I was literally standing, you know, there's a longer story behind this, but I ended up co-founding a company called Grasslands.

we employed this practice of holistic grazing. I saw with my very own eyes that it actually works. We could share tons of photographs about it. The scientists say it doesn't work because it requires holistic decision-making, not reductionist hold everything constant and test the system. So we're now into having to question Western science methodology. And that's what Alan is, you know, in a sense, taking a lot of spears in his back for because he's been our,

arguing that, you know, in a living system, in any complex living system, the context is always changing. So you can't hold the variables constant because the variables are always changing. And so rather than, you know, setting a set of goals and then monitoring for success, you can establish goals, but then monitor for where things are moving wrong and then adapt and adjust, which is, again, how living systems work. So anyway, I literally was standing on a ridge in Montana, looking out over the grasslands, talking with Alan, and he was looking at the ground and talking about how everything's all screwed up in a very micro-state on the ground. And I'm looking out at this wide-open view. And I had this idea that if this works in the living system

we call the grasslands, why can't this same approach work in what I call a living system, the global economy? And that was really the genesis of the idea of regenerative economics. and maybe just to make this a little bit more clear, I hope, the idea of regenerative economics, and I wouldn't even call it a field yet, it's an idea seeking to become a discipline. But the idea is quite simple. It's based on three premises.

The first one is the most important. The human economy is a living system. And I'll maybe pause for a second just to sort of let people, process whether they think that's correct or incorrect because it's certainly worthy of having a debate is the human economy a living system. Well, just off the top of my head, I fully agree with that assertion. We obviously have living and non-living inputs into our system. We are appropriate 40% of the net primary productivity from the sun. We use all the dead phytoplankton and algae

in the form of fossil fuels. We're 8 billion living beings. ourselves and we have interaction and our waste streams affect the living systems of Earth. So every part of the system is alive and have interactions. And interconnected and interdependent. Yeah. Yeah, you understand this better than I do, but I looked at it more simply, which was that human beings are clearly living systems. You know, you and I are living systems.

And I was very influenced by Gaia theory, James Lovelock and later Lynn Margulis, is Margolez's work that essentially asserted that Gaia, the planet, was a living system. That was very controversial when he said it. It's still probably controversial, but moreover, what is the definition of life, rather than is the Earth a self-organizing, self-governing system that continues somehow through its own doing as opposed to through any outside force or control? In fact, the cosmologists now believe that the entire universe is a living system. But one thing about living systems is that their patterns repeat, as you know, from very small scale to very large scale.

And so my simplest sort of defense of the assumption that the economy is a living system is that it's made up of human beings and their tools and technologies. And it's embedded in a living system we call Earth. and therefore it needs to, you know, it's by definition is a living system if it's going to continue as a sustainable system. And the second premise is that we, we, the science of living system science, has learned and now can articulate what the patterns and principles that describe how life works look like. They're not laws like the laws of physics. They're more tendencies toward patterns toward things.

But if that is true, and that is true, that is accepted science, living system science, then my argument is, as I was saying, if the human economy is going to be sustainable over the long run, someone needs to make the case that either it has to abide by those same patterns and principles, or it's the only exception to the rule that every living system behaves this way. Otherwise, it's now a dead system. What is conventional, you mentioned neoclassical economics, do they opine on whether the human system is a living system? Well, I know that's a trick question. I mean, so this is a rabbit hole.

I don't know how much you want to go down this rabbit hole. In fact, I know you've- Well, it's central to our cultural challenges because most people, there's 240 million young humans that are. are enrolled in college in the world. Many of them take Econ 101 classes. And if we're being taught that we're not part of a living system, that has huge implications for our future. But go ahead and finish the question.

I made it as in economics. These questions never occurred to me. I didn't do a PhD in economics where I probably wouldn't be here. That's right. But I was shocked to learn when I actually went back to study the history of neoclassical economics, that it is literally built on a foundation of Newtonian physics to this day, never updated. And what that means is that, and by the way, most disciplines that arose in the 18th and

19th century were built on the same mechanistic Newtonian, because Newton was this, you know, genius. And so most of the sciences, including biology, looked to Newton to, um, to, um, to develop their thinking. And so we're, in all domains of knowledge, we're much more influenced by this mechanistic, you know, what we refer to as clockwork universe, the idea that reality is a machine

that continues as a machine. And we use words like, what's the mechanism for this? And how do we dial that in? And how do we? But economics for sure was not only influenced by this, but built on this. And I was blown away when I discovered in an Irving Fisher textbook,

the literal translation of particle in Newtonian physics translates to individual in economics. I mean, literally with an arrow between. I didn't know that. I did not know that. It's like right there in a textbook. And all of the developments since then, and I shouldn't say all, There is a wide field of non-traditional economics. Many, many different disciplines developed, as you know. But the mainstream neoclassical economics, including canes, came in and essentially patched the wobbles, as I describe it.

It's very analogous to when the astronomers believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. And then when they'd observe the planets wobbling back and forth, they developed theories to explain the wobbles, rather than questioning the fundamental understanding, fundamental assumption. And I would argue that neoclassical economics has done the exact same thing. And if your listeners are surprised or in disbelief or if they're economists, then someone needs to explain to me how they awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to a Yale economist, William Nordhaus, in 2018, for his work that suggested that we should shoot for three and a half degrees warming.

because anything lower would cost too much. And Nordhaus fully understands the climate science, and yet he could still come to that conclusion. And somehow the Nobel Committee, the Swedish Central Bank that awards this prize in honor of Nobel, it's not a legitimate Nobel Prize, could actually award him the prize for that, which is even more astounding.

I don't know if you listen to Corey Bradshaw's episode, who's a quantitative biologist recently, at three degrees Celsius, it's estimated we lose half of the species on Earth. Yeah. Not humans, though, but anyways, thank you for that. And what is the third premise? Well, the third premise is that, as I mentioned,

if the human economy is to be sustainable, meaning a living system over a long period of time, and I don't mean years or decades, I mean, you know, into the future forever, then it will need to behave and be described by these same patterns and principles. So I want to ask you about the eight principles of regenerative economics. But first, let me ask you this.

How does regenerative economics, the aspirational field that you are one of the leaders of, differ from ecological economics, steady state economics, post-growth economics? Can you give a succinct explanation there? Yeah. So, you know, as I was saying earlier, I see it as built on the foundation of ecological economics. And I, you know, it's people with ideas are often, I think, guilty of being critical of anyone's idea, but their own idea. And so I just want to say very clearly, I mean, Herman Daley is one of my intellectual heroes. Mine too. I'm fortunate to be able to have called him a personal friend.

a colleague. I was part of an effort to try to get him awarded the Nobel Prize, Nobel Peace Prize, knowing he would never win the economics prize. I never say never, but go on. Yeah, that's true. No, he can't post, I don't think they award it if you're posthumously. Okay. But anyway, I think his work and his teachers work, you know, to introduce the entropy law into economics is foundational and fundamental. But as I was saying earlier, I think if that's all there is, then, you know, we may as well go farming and fishing and sailing and whatnot. Because I believe the human, your superorganism is not needing to be constrained and share the wealth better. I think that's a, I mean, let me back up.

the conversations you've had with Daniel Schmectenberger on this podcast, if, you know, I would never, I will never understand the, the double bind as well as you two have discussed it on this podcast. You know, I don't think any human brain can work the way Daniels can and game-thearing out all the

possibilities of how to get out of this box that we're in. But, in my search for a pathway out of the, box, admittedly, this is moving out beyond anything that's acceptable in mainstream business conversations. My lesson about from regenerative agriculture tells me that there's a pathway to create potential and to manifest potential that no one sees until it's been manifested. And in agriculture, what that looks like is a highly degraded either farm or grasslands. think of bare dirt, dust flying everywhere, being regenerated into a healthy ecosystem

through holistic management. I've seen that with my own eyes. You can measure it. We do measure it in agriculture. And so if we can get clear on what are the first principles that create the conditions for that to happen, there's no logical reason why, if the human economy is a living system, why those same first principles apply to a human economy, will not also create conditions for life and potential to emerge that no one can believe is possible in advance.

So to sort of close a loop on your question, the difference between ecological economics and regenerative economics is that regenerative economics is shifting out of the purely materialist paradigm into what we in the regenerative space call the regenerative paradigm, which means if you're, you align with the patterns and principles of life, you manifest potential that is unknowable and unseeable in advance. And that's very difficult for an economist because economists want to be able to put stuff in a spreadsheet and put probability weights against it and put it into your projections in order to create a forecast of this policy will create that outcome. But this policy creating that outcome is Newtonian thinking again. And maybe as an analogy, I'll just share, you know, if you think about when you go to the doctor, and again, remembering our human body is a complex living system.

And by the way, the same problems we have in Western medicine, you know, it's the same story playing out in Western medicine as it is in economics. But when we go to the doctor, we, you know, we are not asked to do 20 push-ups or. or run the 100-yard dash, outcomes that we might care about, they take our blood pressure, they test our pulse, they see what minerals are in our blood and other things and what are low and high, all kinds of metrics that have, that we don't care about in terms of outcomes, but that are intrinsic indicators of health. And so imagine if we had an economics, a discipline of economics, where we actually understood what are the intrinsic measures of health in an economy, in a society. And we managed toward creating the conditions for those health metrics to be moving

in the right direction. And that's a big break from ecological economics, which is more about the physical limitation on the scale side. And, you know, as you know, Herman, he spent, you know, decades working on the kind of human social, you know, alternatives to GDP piece as well. And again, I say Herman, Herman and his colleagues for many years. So what are the, at the core of regenerative economics, what are the eight principles which describe what living things adhere to? Could you briefly label them and give a short description of each? So the way I always like to start with this in the most important piece and the most difficult for people to accept peace is the shift from reductionist thinking to holistic thinking.

And holistic thinking may sound a little bit woo-woo to some people, but it is a different way of understanding how the world works. And I learned this through Alan Savory, who directed me to Jan Smuts. And if anyone's interested, I highly recommend Smuts' ecology and evolution, I believe it's called. And again, another controversy of person, but no doubt a genius. He was a pen pal with Einstein. And Einstein is purportedly said to him once, my idea of relativity and your idea of holism will determine the future course of civilization. So that caught my attention. As I see, it just caught your attention, your eyeballed, your eye

went up. And basically, the issue is that ever since the scientific revolution, we have learned about things by breaking down the complex into their component parts and understanding the parts. and through that we've developed all this specialized knowledge. But as one of my other teachers, West Jackson, likes to say, there's nothing wrong with the reductionist method so long as we don't confuse the method with the way the world actually works. And in simple language, you know, the sum of the parts,

the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The whole is able to be to manifest potentials that you would never imagine possible by studying the parts. and yet the traditional economics field is about studying the parts and breaking things down into the parts. And, you know, I used to work in derivatives. I mean, there's nothing more reductionist than breaking down all kinds of risks into their parts and managing them on different desks. And then suddenly you have a financial crisis. Well, yeah, you saw that from both ends because didn't you help out with the blowup of long-term capital management at J.P. Morgan later?

Yeah, that was my 15 minutes of fame. That was the morgan guy on. Oh, your 15 minutes of fame is coming, John. Okay, so that's the first one. And I'm totally aligned with that. I call it narrow versus wide boundary thinking as my shorthand, but fully on board with that. I didn't know what you meant by that. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Is that what it is? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So because it's so critical because until that locks in, the rest, you can forget the rest. But if that does lock in, it changes everything. And that's true for not just economics, but for education, for agriculture, for the built environment, for health care, et cetera.

So once we get below that holistic way of seeing, you know, I quickly say that there are no right first principles. There are different ways to describe complexity. I've taken my best effort at doing it, and I've come up with these eight first principles. But again, your audience that's the most alert will recognize that I've now shifted into reductionist thinking in order to describe something. So that's okay to use the reductionist method

so long as we don't confuse these eight principles with reality. There's a famous Buddhist saying the fingers at the moon are, these are all just fingers pointing at the moon. Don't confuse the fingers with the moon. So, eight principles. So the first one, probably if someone asked me, what's the most fundamental? The language I use is in right relationship. And this is essentially stating the truth that everything, not just in what we call life,

but in the entire universe now is accepted science, is not only connected to everything, but interdependent on everything. And if you think about that in the context of an economy, how much of our current economy, do the exchanges work in right relationship where there are exchanges of mutual benefit as opposed to exchanges of extraction? Many, many, if not most of the exchanges

that happen in the economy are a rise out of, not out of relationships, but out of transactions that are inherently a competitive dog-eat-dog, get-what-you-can approach to business. In fact, we have an expression, well, it's just business. In other words, business is expected to be violent and extractive. So in-right relationship is fundamental.

Another one is, again, my language is empowered participation. And I would distinguish this from the work in the new economy space about inclusive capitalism or inclusive economies. Inclusivity is a moral position that I happen to agree with, or an ethical position, probably more accurately, that I happen to agree with. But it is not a description of living system science. A description of living system science is not just, you know, be nice to people, include them in your decision. It's actually all parts of the system need to be empowered to participate in the system for the health of the system. So again, using our body as an analogy, our feet and our toes are empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen, which is nice for our feet and our toes. But it's also essential for our holistic health.

If without our feet and our toes, we can't walk. If we can't walk, we can't manifest our potential as a human being. So imagine if we thought about problems like poverty, and problems like inequality, not as either an ethical issue you can care about or not care about, but as a fundamental design principle that you can't ignore, any more than you can ignore the law of gravity if you're trying to build an airplane. That to me is the analogy of empowered participation. It's essential. It's not a choice. Honors community in place, living systems happen in place. So all of the work in alternative economics around bioregionalism and local economy, that all fits into this regenerative frame, but it's not the whole picture of a regenerative frame. It's one of the eight principles.

Robust circulation. Here's one that, you know, again, think of your superorganism as a metabolism. Living systems have a metabolism, which is way more complex. than the simplistic circular, you know, inputs in, reuse, recycle, waste is food. Of course, that's all part of this, but the metabolism of how we use energy is way more complex than that. And the second distinction between the principle I call it is robust circulation and what we think of as the circular economy is that it relates not just to matter and energy, or matter energy, it relates more importantly to information. So if we live in an information age, and you know, some people now believe information is, and I don't mean just sort of, you know, digital information, I mean information, is essentially the same as consciousness. But if information is fundamental to an economy, then their robust circulation of information is

fundamental. And look what just showed up in our lifetime, the internet. What does the internet do? It facilitates robust circulation and empower participation in that information. And uses more energy and ecological destruction at the same time. Yeah. So the problem is the internet, the use of the internet, the way we use the internet, creates all kinds of problems, including the human health, you know, mental health crisis in our kids. And the AI thing is going to be exponentially. I mean, you would know better than I.

I don't even want to go there. But the internet is a brilliant example of regenerative potential emergent. We could call it innovation, and it is innovation. But it's innovation that's adaptive. and responsive to the changing context. And so we humanity needed the internet to fulfill our potential. And that technology arrived remarkably in our lifetimes.

Let's hope that what we're doing right now is not our potential. Yeah, what we're doing with the internet. Yeah. But the problem is we don't apply living systems principles to our business models. So we find it acceptable to have a business model built on. extracting data through the advertising business models without permission and then monetizing that in a way that creates addiction, which is highly degenerative. But I would argue that the internet, the technology of the internet, is the most

powerful example of emergent regenerative technology to happen in our lifetime, if we learned how to use it in alignment with how life works. So, anyway, robust circulation, imbalance, dynamic balance. Probably don't need to spend a lot of time talking about that. But, you know, one of the biggest challenges is that things in nature are in balance. It's a dynamic balance. Think about a food chain. You know, if you take the wolves out of the Yellowstone Park, suddenly the system is no longer

in balance and the system collapses. But if the wolves are back, it's imbalanced. The herbivores on the grasslands are in balance if they're managed correctly, either through natural systems or biomimicry approaches. But one that is a stumper and would welcome your thoughts and your audience thoughts is how do we restore the balance between power and constraint that is a reality of living systems? Well, first of all, And by the way, I've now built up or preserve of over a dozen questions for you.

So this might have to be a two-part interview. But first of all, what about ecological overshoot? We have $8 billion consuming hominids on an economic system on a finite planet that's growing. There's no dynamic balance there. So you mentioned scale in ecological economics, and scale does not exist in neoclassical economics. What is the scale of a regenerative economy? Trees we know grow at 2.6% in volume per year the world over roughly, depending how young they are or old they are, which latitude.

But we use orders of magnitude more energy than 2.6% of biomass growth can throw off per year. So there's a pretty big disconnect in what can be regenerative. and what our $8 billion and growing human economy consumes every year. Yeah, so a great, great point. And I should have talked about, you know, carbon emissions, carbon when I talked about robust circulation. One of the requirements of circulation is both healthy inputs and healthy outputs. So we are, you know, grossly in violation of the principle of robust circulation. I only talked about the circulatory part of it, not the input and output part of it.

So you're specifically addressing the output, the emissions output. And the truth is, you know, we are in breach of that planetary boundary. We are in overshoot. And there's going to be a reckoning one way or another. And there's nothing about ecological, sorry, regenerative economics that has anything new to say about that versus ecological. economics. So regenerative economics, the aspirational field, as you labeled it, is aspirational, like donut economics. It's something that is a new framework of how humans can potentially live on the planet in the future. You know, one of the core problems I have with a lot of the

degrowth, you know, plans, including. Donutin economics, I think it's a wonderful framing and I agree with it. They describe what's wrong with our current system quite well, but it's like that one cartoon where there's all this math proof on the board and then there's the solution and then there's and a miracle in the middle happens and they're pointing out to that. Like how do we get from here to there? Is it is a big question or is it just let's go in that direction and these eight principles are something that changes people's values and their framework and their perception, which causes them to leave J.P. Morgan and work on Alan Savory's, you know, better soil, holistic management as one

example. We can get to that, but that's the miracle in the middle is always something that is a little B in my bonnet. Lots to say on this. I guess I would say there's a distinction between goals of a system and design principles. Okay. And ecological economics and, you know, Kate's visualization of the donut, you know, beautifully combines planetary boundaries with, you know, one version of social floors.

There are many that could be embedded in that same donut. But those are all goals. And, you know, when I, of our mutual teachers, Dana Meadows taught us that the most important way to change the system is not, the goals are important, but the most important is the paradigm. And so I've literally since I read Dana Meadows been working on the paradigm. So this is all about paradigm shift. And the shift in paradigm is from reductionist problem solving, as we've been saying, to holistic living systems, create the conditions for health and let go of the outcome. And I

I don't know what a, I'm using the metaphor of metamorphosis, except we don't know what the butterfly looks like yet. Now, that'll make most materialist, reductionist, quantitative thinkers very uncomfortable, because I'm proposing a concept where I can't tell you what the outcome is going to look like. But I didn't know I was going to be teaching courses on regenerative economics over Zoom when I started on this journey. And so that's a tiny little example, maybe an important example, I hope, of regenerative potential manifesting in a way that no one anticipated prior to one individual's kind of endless search. And the coincidence of a pandemic and the coincidence of the invention of Zoom. And there you have it. I'm doing something that is completely different than any forecast. have had. And if that's true for me, there's nothing special about me. That can be true for every

human being on this planet. And suddenly you've got a different economy. But we don't know what it looks like in advance. So I can't tell you how we're going to get off fossil fuel emissions. I do believe that there's way more potential to absorb excess carbon through natural processes then we, you know, if we invested half the energy in time and resources in sequestering carbon, in the oceans, in the forests, in the mangroves, in the seagrass, and on the grasslands and our farms, as we have trying to invent AI, we'd be in much better shape, which isn't to say we don't have to stop burning carbon. We obviously have to stop burning carbon. And I don't have an answer for how the economy will look post, you know, we, one way the other stop burning carbon. You know,

my guess is that we're, and this won't surprise your listeners, we're at the beginning of a very long painful adjustment. The reason I keep working on regenerative economics is that no matter what happens, I believe the pathway out of it will be to align with the patterns and principles of how life works. And maybe that's, with 8 billion people and it's not so bad, or maybe that's with 6 billion people and it's terrible, or maybe it's worse than that. You've talked about regenerative economics as mimicking how life works, but didn't humans to this point mimic how life worked? I mean, we are nature, and for the longest time,

we were roughly stable until the climate warmed and stabilized, and then we found agriculture and it started hierarchy and then surplus and then fossil fuels and then fractional reserve banking and then AI and then finance like finance played a role in accelerating the maximum power principle it was a larger straw so aren't aren't we mimicking nature right now the way I like to think about it Nate and I don't pretend to have an answer to this this may be my choosing to see the glass half full. Well, let me say it differently. There's two possible explanations.

One is the human species is destined to go extinct, and we're just a mistake. And we're in the process of doing that, and life will go on without us, and we were a great innovation and experiment. But like most, I don't know, you would know this better than I. most species do go extinct.

So the averages, they last around a million years. So we've lasted 300,000. Oh, so we got time to run. But that's just an average, and we know about average. Yeah, just an average. I choose to believe that we're in a more adolescent stage of development, and that we don't think in long time frames, but in the scheme of things, this, you know, your energy pulse,

and what I'll call the finance algorithm pulse is all, I mean, the finance algorithm pulse has happened in my lifetime. Did you know, I just learned this recently. There didn't used to be such a thing as a CFO. Like CFOs are an invention of, I think it was in the 1970s. So the idea to to govern and manage firms to optimize financial capital is brand new. It's a three-year-old baby. It's not even a three-year-old baby. It's just been born. And all the craziness that UNIV I've experienced in our prior career and are witnessing now watching crypto, for example,

is all just sort of the very early stage of what could be a much more wise trajectory. It wasn't that long ago, about 100 some years that Thorstein-Vebblin said there's two parts to an economy. There's the manufacturing and the pecuniary, which just was money moving around money, and it didn't add anything to the well-being other than that sector. So, yeah, you're right. Finance is one of the protrusions on the body of the economic superorganism. We need to introduce into your podcast if it hasn't been introduced already the word cremastasis. Wait, say that? Cremastasis? Cremestasis.

How do you spell? I don't know. Oh, I've never heard that word. You're kidding. I am happy to bring to you the word cremastasis, which I read Herman Daly's book for the common Good. I remember it like it was yesterday. I'm sitting on my couch in my living room. So I read For the Common Good. It was one of the first books that caused me to leave Wall Street, but I don't remember that word. I keep going. You weren't paying attention. Well, typical. I can't even

tell you it's Chapter 7. Okay. That's how well I remember it. And Herman explains that Aristotle had this word, or the Greeks had two words. Oikinomia, which of course is the root. of the word economics as well as ecology. But Oeconomia means translates to management of the household, which is really what economics is about. But there was this other word that is no longer in use. But Aristotle wrote about called cremistasis, C-H-R-E-M, whatever.

And cremistasis is essentially, you know, I'm just from memory, the use of money to make money. And I remember sitting there. It was one of times where I couldn't put the book down. It was probably one in the morning. And I said to myself, that's what I do. And yet Herman was explaining it, as Aristotle did. In fact, Aristotle used the word, it was unnatural.

So maybe Aristotle was a regenerative economist. Well, it's making money out of money is unnatural, but that's just the proximate goal. The ultimate goal is to amass power, which is a larger share of resources for one's company or tribe or nation. And so it's the money that's linked to energy. That's not so unnatural,

though at this scale, it obviously is unhealthy. You know, we're just a species out of context because maximizing return in that sense, didn't exist for 290 some thousand years because all of our wealth was our social capital. We didn't have anything. We didn't care anything with us.

It really struck me that we now, we don't differentiate between an economy, the real economy and the financial economy. And, you know, investment strategies don't differentiate between 12% risk-adjusted return in this strategy that's speculating in high-frequency trading versus 12% risk-adjusted return that is investing in wind farms or, you know, whatever. But we literally don't distinguish it.

We call it all investment. We call hedge fund speculators investors. And it's not only socially approved, but this is what people aspire to still, although I think it's changing. So regenerative economics is the beginning of a paradigm shift of this is not aligned with long-term natural systems and service of life. And at some point, it will no longer be feasible. And we need individual humans, groups of humans, communities, and larger enclaves to start thinking and living differently towards that aspiration. Exactly. And here's what's the hopeful part of it is that if we do that, we will participate in the magical process of life that explains why we're having this conversation. Whereas right now we're fighting that process.

Okay. So I have some questions. But could you relatively succinctly finish your overview of your terms? So edge effect is another one. Edge effect is where two systems meet, like, for example, a river meets an ocean. It's called an ecotone in ecology. And at the edges, you have maximum diversity because you have species from the two different systems meeting. So you have the possibility for novelty at edges. You also have a lot of danger at edges. but that's where emergence into new ideas, new forms of life can happen.

And so think about what we've done in our reductionists. Just think about the academy. We've broken every discipline into specialized silos. You award a professor tenure and they don't want to talk to people in another silo. We've done the same in business. We have the marketing department, the operations department, the IT department. everything is specialized to make them more efficient, which has lots of advantages. I'm not saying this is irrational or illogical.

But again, going back to holism, we lose the possibility of one plus one equals three. And so the entire move in academia toward not only transdisciplinary thinking, but transdisciplinary thinking is an example of people recognizing that there's value at the edges between the, the disciplines. You know, one of the things that I always like to say is there's lots about the current economy that is the regenerative economy. If we learn to see it that way, I use the example of the internet. But it turns out living systems are incredibly innovative, but their innovation is specifically adaptive and responsive to their changing context. It's not innovation for the sake of innovation. So it's not innovation just to give some knucklehead more convenience on shopping. It's innovation that is actually helping the organism adapt to the changing context.

And so we need to think much more deeply about what innovation we fund and we encourage and what innovation we put the pause button on the way, you know, well, I'm going to go down that rabbit hole. What else have I? Oh, one of the most obvious ones. So I use the language views wealth holistically. In fairness, this one really sits within balance, but the idea that there's multiple forms of wealth in finance jargon, multiple forms of capital, and we treat wealth as if money equals wealth. This is to me just sort of a self-evident truth, but we need to learn to balance the multiple forms of capital as opposed to maximizing a single form of wealth, is money, which is what our system, literally the finance algorithm is designed, and it works

really well to maximize financial capital. I didn't mention one critical thing in the balance category, Bob Yulanovic, who's a process psychologist, has done empirical work studying living systems and discovered that they balance resiliency with efficiency. And there's a a beautiful curve that looks like an upside down U, but it's skewed toward power curve. Is that it? Yes. You would know better than I. So it's skewed toward resiliency, which is interesting.

But economics is all about maximizing efficiency. So you wonder why we've essentially got an economics. And so the pursuit of globalization, the on-time inventory, all that is pursuing efficiency at the expense of resiliency. And then you wonder why our supply chain. can crater the entire economy because they're super efficient but not at all resilient. Same with Wall Street. It became super efficient extraction of returns on financial capital through leverage and through all kinds of means, but ended up leaving the system very brittle, which would have collapsed were not for the central banks.

And my view is it is likely to collapse or at least shrink, and that is going to be the onset of the great simplification for many listening to. this show. I don't know how many more rabbits we have to pull out of the hat. AI may be able to kick the can a little bit more and I'm boosting productivity. But let me ask you this. Every new assertion you make, I get three new questions. You come from a finance background. You were a derivative specialist. Now you are outlining an aspirational framework for a regenerative economics based on living principles. Can finance be part of regenerative economics? Is there a role for finance, given everything you just said, in a regenerative economics?

So there's another big conversation. You know, it's funny, Nate, I put out my, I call it a paper. It's really a book, but it's available in a PDF form called Finance for a Regenerative World. and I intentionally didn't call it regenerative finance because I'm not sure if there's such a thing as regenerative finance. Well, there is. It's what you said. Yeah, no, there is.

There is. That's a rabbit hole. But anyway, it's interesting. The whole refi movement caught on to it. And apparently I'm well known in the refi space, which is the crypto world where there, it's essentially creating carbon credits, is the simple way to understand it and monetizing them through blockchain.

But I mean, I've written hundreds of pages on regenerative finance. I do believe that that there is such a thing as a financial system that serves a regenerative economy is probably the best way to say it. But it doesn't look like the current financial system. So regenerative finance right now actually exists, but it's regenerative for the capital holders. It's not regenerative for the whole economy. Yes. That's a good way of saying, although that's an oxymoron because it violates the principle of right relationship, holistic wealth. Yes. And it eventually is not regenerative even for the individual because of the biosphere and

I mean, a cancer cell is regenerative. Exactly. Right. Until it undermines its host and then they all die. Right. So that's, and I actually, Nate, I mean, and this is very, uh, difficult for me to figure out how to even communicate because, you know, all of our old friends immediately will feel attacked. And I'm not attacking individual people, but finance, you know, and this is probably my bias because I know it. But the financial system is probably the biggest obstacle we need to remove in order for the natural process of a regenerative economy to emerge. The people in the regenerative space use... It's like such a big tumor that if you remove it, you kill the host.

I don't think so. I mean, I spent a couple of years. Remember post-financial crash? The financial transaction tax was kind of in the news and in play, particularly in Europe. So I spent probably two years writing about and schlepping down to Washington and talking to people about why this was such a good idea. And my agenda was that the excess speculation, think about what speculation is in the context of the principle of right relationship. It's by definition, one winner and one loser, right? You can't have a mutually beneficial speculation. You know,

if I buy IBM shares and you sell them, one of us is going to make money and one of us is going to lose money by by the end of the day. And the business of speculating is, and here's again where it gets tricky to talk about it too quickly. There's a productive role for speculation, market making, but then taken to an extreme, it becomes, in my opinion, very, it becomes extractive and in a sense it undermines the health of the system, which is what we have today. We have a massive, to call it a casino is kind of trivializes it, but we have, you know, trillions of dollars of capital flowing on a daily basis that is purely speculative in nature. And a financial transaction tax would be a very simple policy that would, you know, and it's

not a new idea, it's as old as the Tobin tax is what it used to be called. And the idea was to throw a little sand in the gears. to slow down the speculation. And in my opinion, if we did that, if we put a small tax on financial transactions, it would make a lot of this very short rapid trading speculation on economic. And by the way, the rapid fire transactions, high frequency trading in multiple forms, is the stuff that uses the most power. So if you're worried about, you know, AI using power, imagine what the financial system absorbs

in energy on a day. basis. So we have lots of places here that we could double click and spend a full hour on. Let me just ask you this. Do you think it's politically, even in the realm of possibilities in the next five to seven years, that there is such a tax that could be implemented? I can't see it today. I thought it was possible post-financial crisis, probably for the wrong reasons, but at least there was a, there was desire to get back at Wall Street then. That seems to have faded. So, so no, I, again, it seems to have faded because we're the stock markets at all-time highs. If we go back down again, it might not. We have short memories. Well, but the abuse was what was so, so, you know, in demand of a response.

But this to me is why the importance of paradigms, I believe that until we shift people's thinking that the economy and the financial system need to behave like a living system, my arguments for a financial transaction tax or any of the other policies I recommend won't even register with people because they see them through the lens of this mechanistic Newtonian system. Let me ask you this. In a regenerative economy that checks most of the boxes of your eight principles at some indeterminate future date. Can billionaires exist?

What shall I say? You should say the truth. I don't think billionaires would exist. But if billionaires did exist, I actually have, again, be careful how I say this, I have far less of a problem for billionaires existing than for that surplus not to be composted before they die. I totally agree, and I expect we're going to have, I hope that we're going to have some big surprises in the coming decade. Because if you think about human history, the fact that an individual or a family or a large family has control of that much.

surplus energy via money is amazing more than Cleopatra or any kings or queens of old. And it's a terrible thing to waste because if some of those people have a change in consciousness like you did and divert those digital. Long before I had a billion. You know what I mean. Well, yeah, that's the other problem is if you have the change of consciousness that you did, you never amass, like it's self-selected for people that won't have that change of consciousness. Exactly.

But I'm not sure that's entirely true. And I've seen things to the contrary of that. Anyways, I digress. Let me ask you another question. Yeah, although I remember hearing your comment about meeting with a billionaire and talking to him about you need to do this, that, and the other thing. And he said, yeah, as soon as I get to $2 billion. So. Well, no, that was when I was on Wall Street. The other, I mean, I managed money for billionaires 20 years ago.

But now the new story is even worse. The new story is meeting with really nice, ecologically literate people who care about climate change that have access to digital wealth and capital. And they understand the problems, but you ask for funding or you tell them, this organization needs support. And they're like, yeah, we're aware there.

Right now we're focused on our investments. so we can contribute more in the future. Like, I've heard that before, too. It really, it both shocks you and it makes you see the dynamic that so many people are captured by the economic incentives and media around the superorganism. So that leaves me. It's the story I saw on my airplane ride. The Walter Annenberg story. That's the culture has defined that as success.

You know. So let me ask. ask you this, in a regenerative economics or a steady state economics or a donut economics that are goals, between here and the goal, if we have, for instance, a lot of the watchers and listeners of this program are nodding their head along with you, this is the direction we need to go. And they they make decisions and make sacrifices and make behavioral changes. Given our evolutionary past, and I'm a strong believer in multi-level selection,

that we all have a cooperative and a competitive nature within us that was hardwired depending on the in-group, out-group conditions of selfishness and cooperation in our past, but isn't in the near future there a large risk of the free rider problem, that if a lot of people sign up for what what you're espousing, that a few bad actors can take advantage of that, you know, growing pro-social,

pro-bias for your sentiment. Yeah, this is a huge, a huge problem predicament that I don't have a good answer for it, Nate. I, um, um, it was,

first let me just, just again distinguished because I think the reason why I'm so passionate about this regenerative paradigm in contrast with ecological economics is that there is a pathway, if we choose it, there's a pathway out of the box that we're in that is scientifically rigorous. It's not just utopia. It's essentially, you know, participating in the process of life. That's what regeneration means, the process of how life works. By the way, I saw you had Frechaff Capron.

So Frechoff's, you know, he talks about four patterns, the first one being the nodal network, the second being the process of regeneration, the third being creative, and the fourth being intelligent. So this regenerative economics is completely sits within that frame. That's different than a steady state shrink and shift. materialist approach, okay? And so I don't want to make that clear. And that's the reason why I think we have to work on this idea because it actually offers us a hopeful pathway out of the box, which doesn't mean it's not going to be

painful. Yeah, I think we all understand that. So for the viewers, what would, for the average person, what would a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a regenerative economy mean for their lives? What would it look like? What sorts of jobs would be available? Give us a colorful higher aerial view. So the first thing, the place to start is really with ourselves. You know, we are living systems. Most of us living in this culture have become unhealthy living systems. And one of the exercises we do in our course is to begin by applying those eight principles to our own physical, spiritual, and emotional selves. And very quickly, you find yourself having to do,

and I know you've become very interested in this recently, you align with all of this sort of, call it inner work that's necessary. And I do believe that that inner work is sort of the foundation of transforming the paradigm, transforming the economy. The reason I'm interested in is there's nowhere else to go. It has to be in that direction. So go on. Yeah. So start with, and again, it's fractal.

Start with the smallest unit of analysis. The next place to move is in our bioregions. And again, the bioregionalism is not a new idea, but, but, but, but, bioregialism, remember the principal honors community in place, it's completely aligned with the regenerative paradigm. And there's thousands, if not millions of people working in their own bioregions now trying to, you know, heal the river system or heal this, that, the other thing. So again, active things we can do to participate in this process, none of them individually seem meaningful, but collectively they add up to something that's quite meaningful. And remember,

everything's connected to everything. So they have impacts that those of us doing that work will never see. And you have to believe that in order to believe that this transformation is possible. The next level up

is, think of it as small business just to make a general term. With my partners at Enrhythm, we are implementing regenerative economy inside small organizations. And the place to begin that is not by working on the, you know, greening the supply chain. The place to begin that is in the

culture of the organization, creating conditions for health inside an organization with the premise that in any organization, whether it's a government agency or a business or a nonprofit organization, these are all organizations that are in themselves living systems. Again, the fractal nature of this. and we've had lots of success converting degenerative extractive organizations into regenerative organizations. And I participate, you know, Capital Institute is a partner within rhythm, and I'm experiencing that process in, you know, in real time over the last several years. And I can tell you that amazing potential emerges out of that. People feeling differently as they show up for work, being treated as human beings connected to. to each other as opposed to particles to be optimized in the machine.

And it goes out from there. I think it's much harder to do this inside of, you know, multinational corporation, but you could do it inside a department or a division of a multinational corporation. And ultimately the hardest is at the economy, at the system level. And, you know, candidly, we're miles from doing that. But I always take comfort in reminding myself that, you know, the Berlin Wall, or any, you know, you know all about phase shift transitions. These changes don't happen gradually and linearly.

They happen very, very slowly and then quickly. And my belief is that we are going to see, we're doing the work to prepare for that phase shift transition at the macro scale. And it may not happen in my lifetime. I feel it's happening. At least, of course, it could be the sample size that I hang out with, but especially in the last few months. I do too, but like you say, we don't hang out with the mainstream by and large, I suspect.

So for someone listening to this program who is largely in alignment, at least with the aspirational goal of regenerative economics, what advice do you have for them today in either their own life or to implement changes at the local level in this direction? what can you tell them as far as advice? You know, where I've seen the most energy, and part of this is, you know, we all want to be, we all want to activate our agency and feel like we're participating and contributing to something, even if it feels trivially small. And this, I mean, I'm now, I went to a meeting,

believe it or not, in Greenwich, Connecticut a couple weeks ago, that included three or four indigenous people, one indigenous elder from the local Pequot tribe, and a group from essentially New England who wanted to figure out how we could create a regenerative bioregion in New England. And, you know, there's a WhatsApp chap that's lit up 24-7 ever since that meeting. there's a hunger, particularly in younger people, to engage in this regenerative work, to restore, you know, beginning by restoring. Restoring is not regenerating, but it's the path to regeneration is to heal what's been damaged. And just like it. Yeah, it's a, it's not sufficient, but it's necessary prerequisite because we can't regenerate with dust.

Exactly. And we, you know, there's all, I mean, And across every type of ecosystem, we know how to heal them by and large. It's amazing. And they heal quickly in years, not in decades, in many cases. The grasslands stories that I know and have seen are, you know, one to two seasons. And you can see with your eyes the difference. So around the world, the ecosystems, we know, for the most part, like you say, scientifically

how to heal them. then there's the entire system, which is we're going to have to have less emissions and probably have global cooling. So either that happens unlikely that there's some process in the global economy that starts, that marries technology and is regenerative at an appropriate scale. Or people take some of their economic surplus and devote some of that surplus. towards restoring and regenerating, or we have different economic incentives,

prices, taxes from doing ecological restoration and regenerative work and systems changes like that, yes? Yeah, and I, you know, I'm not smart enough to tell you how this is going to work, not even close. I think a couple of fundamental things are true. One is that the worst things get, the higher the pressure, the more likely it is for radical change to happen. And so, in a sense, our biggest asset, the fuel fuelingness is going to be the collapse itself, because that's going to wake people up much more than any intellectual arguments will.

But that's a double-edged sword, because if the collapse is too extreme, then people are only going to care about consumption at the moment and not regeneration. I know. And I don't know, I don't have an answer for that. What about young people? You mentioned that they're interested in New England, et cetera, but what advice do you have to the young humans becoming aware of all these crises and listening to this program? So I think a lot about, I mean, I have three kids and I suppose at some level my passion about this is thinking about my kids and the world that they're, that they have inherited. And that began when I experienced 9-11 up close and personal.

I didn't share that part of the story. And I got home and held my three kids in my arms and knew instantly I didn't know what world they were going to grow up in. So I would say the first thing is to understand that, you know, if you're a college graduate, it, understand that what we're teaching, particularly in economics, but in many other fields, in universities, is the cumulative knowledge of this reductionist paradigm. And it's not to say that it's wrong, but there's a much bigger lens. I like your wide lens. There's a much bigger

lens that is the place to begin. And the reason that I'm now dedicating so much of my energy to education is that until we see, you know, it's like we're, you know, it's like we're in Plato's cave looking at a movie on the wall. We're not seeing reality. And until we see reality and, you know, your podcast is obviously a huge piece of helping people see reality. We can't even have an intelligent conversation. So I, if my first advice to young people is to get yourself educated, don't stop learning like our generation did. Keep learning. None of us understands this yet. And, um, uh, and there's lots of opportunities to do this. this outside of the mainstream academy.

And the second bit of advice I would give is, I'll just share if I can. I know we're out of time. My dad was in World War II and part of the greatest generation. And I had an opportunity to take a trip with him a couple years before he died. And I did it because in my generation, I didn't really have a close, tight, loving relationship with my dad. He loved me, I loved him, but, you know, we didn't hang out and talk a lot. And so I wanted to learn about him and his life and hear him reflect on it.

And as we were driving and whatnot around New England, I kept asking him about his life. And he kept switching the topic back to the war. And what became clear to me is that the war for him gave him purpose. and it certainly wasn't easy. And he saw stuff that I wouldn't want to know about. He was actually on the ships on the Normandy invasion. He didn't land on the beach, but he was on a supply ship. And then he was in Japan.

And the message of all that for young people is that the world we live in now and you grow up in is going to be difficult, just as it was for my dad in World War II. But it will give you a purpose. and meaning that our generation lacked. So hang in. What do you care most about in the world, John? Simple question.

Well, I have to start with my kids, my family, my dog, my 14-year-old dog. But beyond the obvious, you know, this is going to sound. I don't know what it's going to sound, but I care that the miracle of life and the life we know continues. Doesn't sound anything at all. Sounds like the truth. You know the next question, if you could wave a magic wand and there was no recourse to your status or security, what is one thing you would do to improve planetary and human futures?

Well, I've already discarded my status if that's a thing. So, you know, I mean, I truly believe if we could see our role, our economy is, I think the myth of separation is at the base of this. And the myth of separation allows us to believe in neoclassical economics. and neoclassical economics and the finance algorithm that it spawned is very much the root cause of the poly crisis. So I would wave my magic wand and cause people to wake up to the regenerative paradigm. That's why I'm working on it. If I thought there's something better I could do with my time, I'd work on that.

So as a former Wall Streeter, let me just double click on what you just framed because you're saying the root of our current problem is not need. Neoclassical economics, it's the myth of separation of humans and the web of life that allowed for something biophysically dead like neoclassical economics to take hold. Correct. And the myth of separation also applies to humans and humans as well as humans and the non-human. And if we could see that we are all, as the 2022 Nobel and physics apparently proves, both interdependent and interconnected, we would see that what we're doing is no different than chewing on our own arm. But we don't see it that way. We see it as other. Thank you so much for your wisdom and continued work on these issues.

and I wish you Guy a speed with your regenerative economics work, and we will certainly continue this conversation, my friend. Thanks, Nate. It was great to be with you. Thanks for your good work. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Battlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.