 Hello, my name is Michael North. We're here at the studios of Think Tech Hawaii in beautiful downtown Honolulu. And we're taking up the theme of the art of thinking smart. I'm the guest host this week sitting in for David Chang. And we have the idea of the art of thinking smart is we get occupied with thinking big and thinking fast. But there's a much better way that can avoid some mistakes, which is thinking smart. So thinking around a corner, thinking two or three or five or ten steps ahead in the chessboard, even thinking beyond the notion of a chessboard. And we try to translate the insights of noted thought leaders into business insights that can be useful to people who watch the show. So today we have a really special guest, a young lady named Elizabeth Saturas. She has several very smart decades behind her and she'll be sharing some of her ideas. She is what you would call an evolution biologist who applies the principles of living systems to economic systems. And to financial market and trading systems and to people systems. What do we learn from the history of four billion years of life on this planet that has created intricate and beautiful designs? What do we learn from that that can be applied in our daily life? So it's a science and it's an art. And I like to begin this program with a graphic. Can we throw up that globe graphic? Because we're here in the center of the Pacific, isn't this an interesting picture? These are two views of the earth, 180 degrees separated. The one on the left shows the Pacific with Hawaii in the center. So you have North America on the edge at the right and Asia and Pacific at the far edge on the left. And the entire planet is water, is the Pacific Ocean. And Hawaii is in the geographic center of that. The whole rest of human civilization is on the right-hand side. Everybody else is grouped over on that side. Maybe the planet should roll over or something. We find it interesting that we're here and we're developing insights that are unique to this place and time where we are. And there's a reason why Elizabeth who is a world traveler and of European origins and has lived all over the world in her lifetime and could live anywhere. There's a reason why Elizabeth Satoris elected to come about two years ago and take up permanent residence in Hawaii. So maybe you can share with us a little bit about, you know, why are you here in the larger sense of the word? Well, I love that graphic, Michael. And you know, we're sitting on the top of the highest mountains in the world right now if you count them from the base of solid matter under that big ocean. And furthermore, we're sitting right in the middle of the biggest tectonic plate on the planet. So we're not going anywhere. We're not subject to earthquakes and things like that. And if we lose our beaches who see level rise, why we can always spit out a little extra lava and make our islands bigger again. So we may be in the most stable place on the planet. And also, we are such a bridge between east and west. And as you said, I'm a planet person and I look at four billion years of evolution. And once I recognize that nature has been doing economics forever. I mean, what is economics but the acquisition of resources, their transformation into useful products and services and you exchange those. And consume them. And in nature's case, recycle them always 100% in our case. Whoops, we've developed a linear economy in which we toss things out at the end and that's gotten us into a lot of trouble. So you talked about not thinking necessarily big but smart. And I'm saying in order to get smart, I think you have to think even bigger than we've been thinking into that planetary level into seeing what our race to build this incredible technological and consumer society has done to our planet and whether that was so smart. So if we just produce and produce and we don't bring back, we don't recycle, then we create a kind of entropy that is very difficult to escape from. You know, I was in China in 1973 when they had a 100% recycling economy and people were even paid for their bucket of night soil in the morning with pennies from our perspective just to show people that all waste has value. And if there was any toxic waste in industry that they didn't know yet how to recycle into something useful, there'd be a national contest among workers, figure it out. So I think that got lost as they got into the market economy but it's coming back now. It's coming back all over the world. The cradle to cradle economics. Basically, you know, the businesses that are going to survive in our world are the ones that are doing something of real use to humanity and to the planet. And that's the way you can ensure your survival is to make sure that you're not making needless things. You know, we've long had ostentatious consumption by elites on the planet and then somebody figured out maybe we can extend that market to everybody and get them all consuming. And it's caused a lot of problems to go beyond our needs into so many things we don't need. So here's a question. How do we change direction? With such a massive weight, it's like a massive ocean liner, right? How do we change direction on something like that? Actually, we are changing direction. We're already doing it because what I discovered about evolution was that the Darwinian concept of a competitive struggle in scarcity which was adopted by all our economists and that sadly is only part of what goes on actually in nature because there's a maturation cycle in which youthful species develop growth economies. They're acquisitive, they hog territory, they make things, they compete with each other, and then there comes a tipping point where it's too energy-expensive to maintain the hostilities that are generated by that model. And then they discover that cooperation is cheaper, more efficient, and that you have all these resources now to spend on making life better for everybody and you move into a stable economy rather than a growth economy, just as your cells divided up until adolescence and then you had to level off and stay the same size. You couldn't keep growing all your life. So nature has done this over and over and over to get to this maturation point where you shift from the Darwinian competition into the cooperation, the community. And now finally, evolution biologists like David Sloan Wilson in his book, Does Altruism Exist, has showed very clearly that selection is not just for individuals in competition but for groups. And the groups that went out are the ones with the most internal cooperation. So cooperation ends up being even more important than competition and if the businesses divide up the pie into the different things that are needed and then feed each other, there's lots of places like Kallundberg in Sweden where companies, the waste of one company becomes product input for another. We have examples of corporations that have taken their own wastes and made new products out of them. So there will always be some elements of competition that appear to be Darwinian in their mechanics. But coexisting with cooperation and cooperation. Yes, friendly competition. I think of Buckminster Fuller as one who did the research into the fundamental design principles of the universe and came up with the conclusion that we are designed to survive. We are designed to thrive and prosper. I know you probably knew Bucky. You probably knew Bucky and you know his work. Yes, very much so. And I wanted to point out that two weeks ago we were together at Chaminade University here in Honolulu where you're a professor and you helped to arrange a quite unique event that was host to a number of delegates from China who came here for a celebration of a special event. And we chose the theme of business ethics as the foundation for peace in the 21st century. And because everybody wanted to speak and everybody spoke a little bit longer and we only had four hours for this seminar, you were to be the final speaker who brought it all home for us and we didn't have a chance to hear it from you. So I know this video is going to be shared with those people in China and with everyone from here who was at that event and there were some really stellar people including Calvin Sey, the speaker emeritus of the Hawaii House of Representatives and a number of other really important leaders here and we were looking forward to hearing your comments on business ethics defining what they are and the necessity for a conscious adoption of an ethical set of principles. Could you give us that summation that you were so ready to give? Yes, well, if you look at mature natural systems whether they are rainforests, prairies, or coral reefs, or human bodies you see that there's a great deal of ethics going on in the economy of the system. For instance, in your body you have 100 trillion cells each of which is as complex as a large human city with 30,000 recycling centers renewing your proteins 24-7 and 1,000 banks giving out free money and no cell is unemployed among those 100 trillion cells. If there's an injury to any part of the system, the body, immediately aid goes there and there's no complaint from the others. The recognition of the diversity is your heart more important than your liver than your kidneys and your skin and your eyes. All of it is working in diversity within this wonderful unity that's the whole body which also includes 10 times 100 trillion gut bacteria that are your first line of defense against anything you throw into your system through the mouth and run 80% of your immune system. So the brain is more like an information clearinghouse. It's not a dictatorship. Every organ has to meet its needs. Every cell has to meet its needs. Every system in the body has to meet its needs. And the constant negotiations among all of those to weave harmony among the different needs at the different levels is the most ethical system I have ever seen. So that's what I would bring into business ethics is to run the system so that it works for everyone. And that doesn't mean everyone's doing the same thing or consuming at the same level or consuming the same things or being paid the same amount. Because when the money is free as in the body system you don't have this competition for money going on. So maybe that's one of the things we should think about. Let's put a bookmark there and we'll take a break for a moment here with the program. Thank you. Thank you. Aloha. My name is John Waihe. And I used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at. I served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you. So I want to invite you in. I want to invite you in to Talk Story with me and some very special guests every other Monday here at Talk Story with John Waihe. Come on in, join us, express your opinion, learn more about your state, and then do something about it. Aloha. So Elizabeth, ethics. You know, the conventional definition of ethics is an ingrained sense of right and wrong, of transparency, of honesty, of truth, of integrity. Yes. Right? And what you appear to be saying is that biological systems, if they're allowed to operate according to their natural energy economy, are automatically ethical. If they're mature. If they're mature. Yes. So how do we run our companies with that kind of ecological awareness in mind? How can we, you know, that the standard management model is a pyramid? There's another model which is a set of concentric circles. There's another network management kind of model. And we know what the experts have been teaching us about how to effectively manage companies. I have a feeling that you have a little bit different take on the appropriate organic model. Yeah. Well, I used to do a lot of workshops with businesses on how to transform from mechanism to organism because that pyramid model you're talking about is like an engineering diagram with the control center at the top and then the managers and the workers and so on. And then you go out into the stakeholders beyond the shareholders and ultimately the whole world. Tachi Kyuchi, who used to be CEO of Mitsubishi America, has a seven-step model for transforming a business from the shareholder model to the stakeholder model or however you want to put that. That name, Takayuchi, could you spell that? Tachi, T-A-C-H-I, Takashi actually, T-A-K-S-H-I. Kyuchi, K-I-U-C-H-I. Takashi Kyuchi. Seven steps. If you Google the seven steps, you will find that. He also wrote a book with, was it Bill McKibbin or the other Bill Shierman? Bill Shierman, sorry, called What We Learned in the Rainforest where they parachuted into rainforests all over the world and came out saying, no problem ever faced by a business has not been faced and solved in a rainforest. So it's a very interesting book because then they go through case studies and show how to apply these lessons from nature. Yeah, you know, we have used nature as though it's a set of resources for our human economic system to grind up into products and make wonderful things, but we have not fit ourselves into the ecology of Earth and that's what we have to do now. We have to build an economy that doesn't harm the ecology and that's to me an ecology which literally means the wise society from Ecos, the household of the economy. It's an economy, an ecology, an ecology and Sophia for wisdom. So that is the wisdom of the future. The planet is getting hotter. We're facing climate change. Our coastlines are going to be massively altered. We may have to move uphill. Note that our shipping ports and our airports in 13 of the largest 20 cities in the world at sea level that all of this is going to involve massive redesign. And China is incredible right now. They were building a green city in Dongtang City in Shanghai Harbor on a landfill island and they got it even though they had a huge investment in it that that was not smart at this time in climate change and are doing this kind of green city building uphill now. Moving back through China when we were at Shamanat, we were studying or we were understanding one particular Chinese economist, political leader, philosopher, Zhou Enlai, really extraordinary figure of the whole 20th century. And maybe you can make a little comment on your experience of Zhou Enlai because we have the sense in America that China was an emerging economy. They were a third world country for a long time. Then they were an emerging economy. Now they're a first world economy right alongside America, but they still have a lot to learn. Yes. Right? And Zhou Enlai was showing the many things that China has to teach America and the rest of the world. Just a few words about that would be great. Yes. Zhou Enlai was still technically premier when I was there in 1973 and knew of my presence in China and arranged a meeting for me personally with three Central Committee members. And I was most impressed with the kinds of questions they asked me about my own work and with the way that they talked about their own society. And Zhou Enlai was the peace ambassador. He was allowing kids who had roots in other cultures to travel there to be more international, which was unheard of at the time. And the West didn't know things like that were going on in China. And everything there at that time was about empowering ordinary people and bringing everybody, like the cells in your body, into the economy. And so you could call it a love economy even. You know, it's not out of the question to talk about it that way as you do in your project, making the film in the footsteps of Zhou Enlai. So China was, for all the horrors and even Mao said, you know, the tree would prefer calm, but the wind will not subside. When you unleash a cultural revolution, people are going to take up power because they haven't been trained for that cooperative mode yet. And it's going to end up being a mess and also doing some excellent things that, like having young people go into low-level service jobs before they're allowed to go into higher education to make sure that they would then use that education to bring it back into their culture. And a lot of nature was destroyed in this massive push to build an industrial society quickly. But now the Chinese can turn things around like no other country, as you know, and they're getting it that climate change is real, that we have to restore nature and fit ourselves into it. And that's my big hope that they'll lead the world in that. So that's hopefully the legacy of Zhou Enlai. Yes. He was an organic philosopher. Yes. And Taoism is a philosophy of humans in nature in balance. Right. Right. And that's balance. So it's deep in the Chinese psyche, I believe, to lead the world in... So we should watch China for lessons. I mean, we should watch with open mind and also with skepticism because there are things to understand and accept and there are things to criticize on both sides. And part of that is because we encourage them. You know, the capitalist west encouraged the feeding frenzy and the consumer society building. Yeah, make all the iPhones you can as quick as you can. That's right. But I believe we are at this tipping point, we are going to mature into a balanced society where we take care of each other and of the planet. You said something right at the beginning that said, when I asked how do we turn something around like this, you said it's already happening. So let's cover two things that are local here, but also with global implications that prove your thesis that it's already happening. One is the course that you've created with others on sustainable business at Shamanad. Tell us a few words about that and how that's working. With a team that's half native Hawaiian, we created four courses as a concentration called Island Economies that are about sustainable living in the future for the business students in the MBA program to learn how to fit our economies into the natural world and how to restore the Hawaiian values of community. So you're one of the faculty that's teaching those classes. And so I just taught the first of the four courses and the other members of the team will then feed into the loop and do the successive ones in a year. That's just great to bring that kind of understanding into higher education. And to see how unsustainable our Hawaiian economy is now and what we can do to make it more sustainable. And to draw on the wisdom of the Hawaiian people to help bring it on. Nature and the Hawaiian culture has a great deal of wisdom, yes. Second, you became aware of, you told us about this resilient city's 100 movement. That's very intriguing because it comes from one of the largest old line philanthropic organizations in the world, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York with its roots back in 19th century industrialism. And still now producing some very useful ideas. And Honolulu was one of a hundred cities that was chosen to be a resilient city. And in our recent balloting, the people of Hawaii approved the idea of creating a chief resilience officer. Well, setting up an office of resilience and sustainability in City Hall and then Rockefeller, as it chose Honolulu in its third cohort to make up the hundred cities, is going to fund a chief resilience officer to head that office. And there have been two meetings just now in December launching the project, which is to address two problems. One is solving the chronic problems we have such as homelessness as way at the top of the list. In other words, the non-inclusive economy, rather than the inclusive economy we've talked about as modeled in our bodies. And the other is to build resilience against disasters. We know that our beaches are already eroding and that it's going to get worse before it gets better. We're importing 95% of our food and energy. We have the best clean energy program in the United States and we just turned out to have the healthiest people in the United States, which is good for us. But we must do more local production. And the way of the future is more and more local production, less shipping things so far around the globe. Doesn't mean we're going to end global trade. But cities to me are natural entities just like cells and cities I believe are the hope of the future, linking up with each other, sharing the information as they try to solve these problems. So this is something that can be focused through City Hall and apparently the mayor has become involved. He got the grant, yes. It's a modest-sized grant, but it's a catalyst. Yes. And you're involved with the group of people. So I'd like to encourage people to contact you. You're a good contact for the beginnings of this for information about how this is working. Because I'm thinking that businesses here need to learn about resilience and this whole organic economy so that they can apply the principles to their own businesses. And the sorts of areas that you just described as being critical are areas where that need increased investment. So investors who are looking for opportunities in Hawaii could do well to look into those sectors and maybe tune into this resilience group. Anything that makes our economy more resilient, our business is more viable. Yes. We'll be more profitable. Yes, it will. We'll have opportunities for investors. It'll generate stable employment and high value. The alternative is going broke. Yes. All right. So there was quite a good group of people, public and private sector. I think you said the Sierra Club was there and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs was there and our friend Ramsey Tom was there. Our friend Roger Epstein was there. Dr. Tussi with his breadfruit initiative all over the Pacific. That's a business that's really coming up. We've come to the end of a very quick half hour. Elizabeth, I want to thank you so much for your time. We could go on for another half hour and a half hour after that. But wish everyone a happy new year. Absolutely. And very pleased to have shared this time with you. A resilient new year.