 One of the principles that I talk about is called empowered participation. That's not an idea I made up. That's from reading about living systems. And what that means is that all parts of the system are empowered to participate in the health of the system. And so, for example, you know, going back to the human body, our feet and our toes are empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen. That's not just because our body feels sorry for our toes and wants to help out our toes and take care of our toes. It's because if our toes aren't healthy and our feet aren't healthy, we can't fulfill our potential as human beings. So what we have to learn is that the health of humanity is harmed when the coal miners in West Virginia are not empowered to participate in some new way in the economy we need. So it's not a charity thing. It's not a bleeding heart liberal thing. It's a systemic health thing. And if we don't understand now that, you know, just look at what happened with our politics and the extreme, you know, the whole Trumpian response, we've neglected, in a sense, the parts of the system, the parts of our body, so to speak, for so long and allowed it to atrophy so poorly that we saw a response. And it wasn't a rational, healthy response. It was an angry, violent response. This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with an old friend, John Fullerton, formerly a Senior Executive Managing Director at J.P. Morgan. And in approximately 2010, he founded something that I find to be very inspiring called the Capital Institute. Over the course of this conversation, we'll talk about many of his ideas, but upcoming courses that I would encourage you to explore and enlist in. And there's just a whole lot of ideas, especially in light of what we've learned in the pandemic, that would make you think he had a heck of a crystal ball 11 years ago when he formed the Capital Institute. John, thanks for joining me. Hey, Rob, great to be with you. Let's talk about this. You're trained, you know, places like University of Michigan. My father's almost moderate. You're very solid, very, how to say, strong professional at J.P. Morgan, working first in the realm in derivatives when I think it's when we met and then after that in the kind of private equity wing there. So you're quite grounded. You have an MBA as well, as I recall. So you're quite grounded in business and financial theory and financial practice. But I remember knowing you in the around the time of the great financial crisis that there were like little things going on in your mind that were uncomfortable and you were sharing those with me. Tell us about what was it that stirred you? What did you see that you didn't like and how has it unfolded since that time? Yeah, little things stirring is a good way to say it. I always like to say I worked for what I call the old J.P. Morgan. It was a very different culture, a very different firm than anything that exists today. And I was very lucky. I rode the derivatives wave for sort of first generation derivatives professional when that whole business first opened up and really transformed the financial system really before derivatives became kind of a dirty word. And it was very exciting time. But gradually over the course of my nearly 20 years at the firm, the culture in the firm eroded, the business got more competitive. I grew a bit restless and anxious. And so I was actually questioning the financial system and the culture of finance before I left. And one of the things, one of the last things I did was I moved into private equity and began thinking about investing capital in alignment with social and ecological purposes. And so, for example, my first private investment I made was in a charter school management company. And so I was already thinking about what we now call impact investing. That was back in 1997. And so I guess I've been wrestling with this idea that we now refer to as the future of capitalism for decades. And left the firm in 2001, took the summer off. And then the first day I was back in Manhattan, I happened to have a meeting in Lower Manhattan at 9.30 in the morning, which turned out to be September 11. And so that experience, I came from the subway back to the street, literally the moment the second plane hit. And that really pushed me into a very deep introspective period. And I started reading tons of books that bankers don't normally read. And that's what really put me on the path that I'm on today. Wow. Wow. Well, the, so that, you know, how do I say sometimes the social circumstance shake us up. And they stir us into what you might call the shadows of where our discord was hiding, but it brings it out to the surface. And I think the kind of things that you explored after, I remember you sharing readings with me, like people like Frischoff Capra, Wendell Berry, Gaia Theory, as I recall was, but, but these were not, you were not giving sermons. You were exploring as a curious person trying to see a different pattern than the one you were being told was true. Yeah, it's a little bit like, you know, everything they taught you at business school isn't true or whatever that expression is, but I probably the most shocking thing I read that really just shook my world permanently once you see this, you can't unsee it, was a book written in 1973 by a group of MIT system science students, PhD students called Limits to Growth. And I remember when I first talked to you on, on at INET, you know, very early on, I think we probably talked about that. And, you know, Limits to Growth was ridiculed at the time as neo-malthusism, you know, alarmism. And, you know, there's research that's documented much more recently that they're, by today's standards, very rudimentary systems model pretty much nailed it accurately. And it's sort of common sense that exponential growth on a finite planet can't continue forever. And we've rationalized our way into thinking that by technology and enhancements and innovation, we can overrule the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics in particular. And, you know, I think, I think we're now realizing and climate change is just the most obvious example of this, but we're realizing that there are what the scientists call planetary boundaries. And we're in the process of breaching many of them. And that triggers all kinds of feedback loops in a system that are threatening to life as we know it on this planet. And what I found in my wrestling with this question is that the neoclassical economic framework literally doesn't contemplate limits of the material expansion of the economy. And I've studied the history of neoclassical economics. And by the way, this has nothing to do with socialism versus capitalism or neoliberalism versus more, you know, socialist variations of capitalism. This is much more fundamental. And, you know, it's fascinating and a bit terrifying to learn that the roots of neoclassical economics go back to Newtonian physics and the belief in simple cause and effect relationships in what's now understood as a complex world where simple cause and effect explains very little of it. And, and furthermore, we've then layered on top of a Newtonian physics framework, the, you know, statistical uncertainty, you know, using econometrics and probability theory, which is very well suited to random events, but not interconnected nonlinear causation. And so we're, we're now sitting in a world that we understand is nonlinear and interconnected complex causes. And our fundamental economics is built on a foundation that's designed for a different set of assumptions. Yeah, this is so Newtonian, not quantum physics, as they say. Yeah, never shifted to quantum. And, you know, I went back and, you know, you can, you can find in Irving Fisher's textbooks the assumptions that he made from the, the mechanical assumptions of, for example, the energy law translates in economics in according to his textbook to utility. So there's just an assumption that energy translates to utility in economics. And, and, and it's interesting, work in leisure, like work is viewed as a negative and leisure as a positive. So there's all these assumptions that were just made up out of thin air. But we've never gone back and rebuilt neoclassical economics in accordance with the way the world really works, which, you know, gets to my work. I've, I've started with the premise that human beings are living systems. I don't think that's controversial. And as you said earlier, Gaia theory, the idea that the entire biosphere is a self-organizing, self-fueling, self-adjusting, miraculous living system that's now increasingly accepted in the science. I wouldn't say it's uncontroversial, but it's increasingly accepted. And so if the human, and the thing about living systems is that they, by definition, sustain themselves over long periods of time, otherwise they wouldn't be living systems, they'd be dead systems. And so my question has been, that I've been holding since I started this work, is what would an economic system design look like if it was designed around the patterns and principles of living systems? And it leads you to some fairly radically different conclusions than what would be the conventional economic paradigm, regardless of whether it's a more socialist, friendly economics or a more free market, friendly paradigm. Yeah, I remember in my own studies, I had a wonderful teacher and emeritus professor in graduate school named Lester Chandler. And he introduced me to something that has become somewhat more popular now of a critique of Adam Smith by a man they called the Earl of Lauderdale. And the Lauderdale Paradox, as it is called, and I give my friends John Bellamy Foster and Robert Munches and Credit, because they wrote a nice article on this, which I'll put on the website along with this episode. But the Earl of Lauderdale said, what do you mean, air and water are free and have no value? If you shut them off, we all die. And what came back, it was particularly some of the French economists backing the framework that we now call neoclassical economics or classical economics. They came back and they said, well, it's free. It's not scarce. And so they defended exchange value as value, not use value. And I think the reason Munches and Bellamy Foster and others brought it up, though, like I said, Lester Chandler woke me up to the fight. But they brought it up because they said the underlying assumptions, and I'm moving towards regenerative economics now, the underlying assumptions was at the time of Adam Smith, 1790s, there was plenty of water and air relative to the size of the population and the use of resources. But as that changed, we're no longer in that place. And it's complicated fiercely by these things being about the common good, not commodities for one or another. And really Herman Daly and ecological economics, which I would put as the kind of foundation of what I'm calling regenerative economics, Herman first introduced the idea of scale into macroeconomics. And he told me once, and I have not checked this, but I assume it's true, if you go into any classical economics textbook, macroeconomic textbook, you won't find the, you won't find the word scale or the concept of scale or limits to scale. So the, you know, like the simple analogy, if you go into the woods and cut down a tree to burn in your, in your, you know, for your cooking, no problem. But you go into the woods enough times and cut down trees and you don't have a forest anymore. And so the issue of scale matters profoundly. And again, I think whether it's the pandemic or climate change or the biodiversity crisis, all of these things are symptoms of our inability to get our heads around the urgent context of the scale of the metabolism of the human economy relative to the metabolism of the biosphere as a whole. Daniela Meadows has written books on systems thinking. I know William Hines runs a group called NAAC at the OECD for new approaches to economic challenges. There are lots of people who've Santa Fe Institute, Don't Farmer and others on complexity. And I guess my sense is the mathematics that was used in neoclassical was that Newtonian type mathematics. And if you're a better mathematician, you can find different models which have different implication implications and things like amplifying feedback loops. So it's a very different, which you might call confidence around normative recommendations when you become a better mathematician. But one of the things that I'm concerned about, and I really want to dig in now with you about regenerative economics, seeing the holistic system, seeing all the crosscurrents, seeing all the public goods, the externalities as economists would call them, is a part of it. But the other is to see the political economy of the resistance to the evolution of the framework and how that interrelates to the resistance to the change of ideas. Because if you've got a better paradigm and when you do sell that paradigm and people say that looks more like the truth, some people have stranded assets and lose a lot of money and they start fighting back. And then we go to what Naomi O'Reskis calls the merchants of doubt. Well, that's playing out in real time right now, for sure. But Rob, as you probably know, I'm actually not a mathematician. In part because I'm not equipped to, but in part because I think one of the mistakes we've made in economics is we've dropped too quickly into modeling theoretical frameworks that we think are better than prior ones before we've gotten clear on first principles. So I'm a huge advocate of getting clear on first principles before trying to then map and then model the economy. And there's a whole branch of complexity science that is, to my understanding, somewhat neutral to the design of complex systems. And the core idea of regenerative economics is that regeneration is the actual process that living systems exhibit that enable them to be sustainable over the long period of time. So it is a real thing that describes real systems in the real living world from the microscopic to literally the cosmic. There's a wonderful book called Journey of the Universe, written by Mary Evelyn Tucker of Yale and Brian Swim, who's a cosmologist. And I have eight principles of my regenerative economics, and the book is short. It's maybe 100 pages. And I literally underlined every sentence in the book about the planet and the universe that references one of those eight principles. And I think I underlined 50 or 60 sentences in a short book. And what that tells me is that the people that actually understand the ever complex and fine, ever creative, ever evolving universe, much less the planet, are describing that same regenerative process that enables your body to be alive today and us having this conversation because our bodies are regenerating at a cellular level on average every seven years. So there is this real thing in real living systems called the regenerative process. And I've done my best as a non-scientist to describe that process in the context of a human economy. And I think that's the way the analogy is that that's kind of what I propose as our compass to guide the new map making we need to do to better understand how to design a system that's actually sustainable over the long run. Yeah, I know that in the healthcare realm, this regenerative awareness is people like Dr. Mark Hyman and others are really very moved by that, that large perspective and framework. Yeah. And in fact, you know, the truth is this paradigm is now affecting all domains of knowledge. So in healthcare, for sure, the, you know, what the language they often use is integrated medicine or integral medicine, which is not dismissing the Western reductionist specialist functional or specialist skillset, but it's bridging it with a more holistic understanding of what creates the conditions for health in the first place. It's a bridging of Eastern and Western approaches to medicine. But in education, you know, the, there's a recognition that the siloed disciplines leave, you know, tremendous gaps between the expertise, the disciplines. And so transdisciplinary education is now understood as sort of cutting edge approach to education. That's the same idea of taking a more holistic approach. And I believe it'll, it'll, it'll, it certainly is affecting agriculture. And if you think about agriculture as the foundation of any human economy, regenerative agriculture is now very much a lively topic and very promising approach to, to creating an agriculture system that's actually sustainable as opposed to extractive and, and destructive. And in the built environment, there's, there's a burgeoning field of regenerative architecture that takes a holistic view on everything from building design, house design to entire city design. So this is a, this is a paradigm shift. And I and others will, will go put our heads out, our necks out and say that this is the, this is the era that follows the modern age and, and this reconnection with who we are and where we fit into the bigger picture into the, the planet, into the earth, into nature. We are a part of nature, not apart from nature is the next big, you know, development in, in, in human civilization that we'll, we'll look back on and see as being as big a shift as the shift from the medieval period to the modern age. Yeah. When, when I think about this, I'm moved by some of the psychological research by people like Jonathan Haidt, who's at NYU and others about the relationship between emotion, particularly fear and making progress. So when people talk in abstract terms that are distant, complex, perhaps confusing, when someone else talks, what I'll call dogmatically and simply about a false paradigm, sometimes they win. Yeah. And I remember Stephen Thulman, one of my favorite philosophers. He was a student of Wittgenstein at Cambridge University in England. He wrote a book called Cosmopolis and he said, from the 30 years war to the present, we had the Cartesian Enlightenment then applied to social science. In some realms, it's been very, very illuminating, but in some places it's false specification creates big fault lines. And he said, in almost every time, World War I, the Great Depression, the culmination of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King's murder and all of these things, what happens is people get afraid and they lurch back to the familiar rather than forward to what they see is where we have to go. So I just put that little asterisk in our conversation because I think the combination right now that's on the horizon and makes you look so prescient or allows the world to see how present you are, I think it's a better way to say it, is there are all these things that were not explained by the core paradigm that regenerative economics can see. But the other side of it on that coin is these new things, climate, pandemic in particular, are quite scary. And some people will be inclined to lurch back to the familiar unless we can figure out not only how to see it, but how to evolve society, social structures in the context of power forward in order to realize the potential of your vision. And obviously, one could counter argue that your vision, if it's not adhered to, might mean we're not a regenerative society and life ends on planet earth. Or at least modern society ends as we know it. I tend not to be a life as life will end or humanity will go extinct, but humans are unique in other species and that we have complexified our existence to higher degrees than other species. And there's no reason why there's no reason why we haven't overshot and we'll have to fall back to a lower level of complexity before we can continue the journey of human evolution. There's no reason I've ever learned that says it always has to be an upward march without corrections. You can make a wrong turn, make a U turn and go back to the previous intersection. And in the past, we've done that. It's just the consequences may not have been as dramatic. The consequences in the past tended to be more individual or national at most, but not truly systemic. But we start messing with the carbon cycle and the water cycle and the other geophysical realities of the earth and start bringing on pandemics that are likely caused by humans, the human footprint encroaching in wild places that it never has before. And the consequences become truly globally systemic. And as you said, we fall back to lower levels of complexity, lower levels of consciousness as a natural kind of a psychological fear of flight, flight or flight kind of reaction. My hope, Rob, is that the idea of regenerative economics is really profoundly simple. You either accept that the human economy needs to behave like other living systems, or you make the case that the human economy is the one exception to the rule that all living systems that sustain themselves follow these similar patterns and patterns and principles. Because the scientists, well, we would debate the language. There's no way to describe complexity in eight principles. So we may have a debate about whether that's the right way to say it. But the basic idea that complex living systems work in a certain way is not up for question. And so the only question is, is there an argument that the human economy will not need to behave the way other living systems do? And I would challenge anyone to make the case that if after billions of years living systems have evolved to follow these same patterns and principles like the principle of symbiotic win-win right relationship among the parts, our cardiovascular system works with our brain and works with our muscular system in order for our entire body to work in a healthy productive way. The brain doesn't compete with the cardiovascular system. So if that's a pattern that exists in nature, how is it that we think that the competitive paradigm is the natural course for human economies as opposed to a more collaborative paradigm? I've recently come across through a friend of mine in the West Coast, a group that's name is heart math. It's not heart path. It's heart math. They have talked about work. They have an app and a system related to meditation called inner balance, where they go to the heart because they think the heart transmits to the brain rather than it being a one-way street in the other direction and which you might call spawns or invigorates cooperative behavior and alleviates fear. And they believe this, not like what you might call romantic parables, they believe this based on scientific testing and evidence over and over again and I just find it fascinating. You mentioned another one of the principles I talk about is balance, right? That's one of the eight principles and balance means many, many things. Each of these principles has multiple layers, right? So at one level, balance in a living system is the balance between masculine and feminine energy and it wouldn't be hard to make the case that our, certainly Western economies do not balance masculine and feminine energy. And I don't mean men and women on boards of directors. I mean left brain, right brain, masculine, feminine energy. It doesn't take, you know, it's sort of common sense that a healthy living system needs to balance masculine and feminine energy or there's not going to be a continuation of the system. I got to let you know, I got hit with that like a ton of bricks about two weeks ago. Some friends of mine and I went over to see Bill Moyers who in legendary times worked with Joseph Campbell, the hero of the thousand faces and so forth. And when he got there I said, Bill, you know, what are you reading? And he said, oh, there's a new book at Harvard by a woman named Maria Tartar and it's called The Heroin with a Thousand and One Faces. And it's taking all of that mythological paradigm and taking it out of masculine frameworks and saying there's something else going on here. Needless to say, I have daughters and sisters and things who are all getting that book for Christmas. Well, but it's so true. I mean, think about, you know, intuition is a form of knowing that our Western, particularly in economics, paradigm kind of either dismisses or slanders. But intuition is profoundly important, particularly in times like this when we're so confused. But, you know, another example of balance, which goes directly to the heart of conventional economics that is very factual, very practical, is there's a process ecologist called Bob Yolonowitz. And he measured the the tendency for living systems to be resilient and efficient. And those are kind of off, those are opposing qualities, right? So the more efficient something is, the more streamlined, the less diverse it is. Whereas the more diverse it is, the more resilient it tends to be. And he discovered from empirical studies, you know, this is in theory, this is empirical studies that healthy living systems exist in this sort of balance, what he calls the window of vitality between resiliency and efficiency. If it's too efficient, it becomes brittle and it breaks. If it's too resilient, it's, you know, it's sort of suboptimal and primitive. And of course, economics is about the pursuit of efficiency. Yeah, though I'll give you credit. One of my recent guests, Marcus Brunermeyer from Princeton, just wrote a book on resilience that's come out. Martin Wolf named it as one of the best books of the year for the FT. And so I think, how would I say the inspiration of our time, global supply change, whatever, is forcing a reevaluation or a recognition of the kind of dilemmas that you're raising. But the key is that living systems are not optimizing resiliency either. They actually are skewed toward resiliency rather than efficiency. But the reason why we need new books on resiliency is because our brains are wired to think that efficiency is what we're supposed to be optimizing for. But the principle is balance, even though it's skewed toward resiliency. So it's, again, the lessons are all there in living systems. And getting clear on first principles, to me, is again, the compass, the roadmap we need. Because if we now try to make everything super resilient, we'll find that the economy bogs down and we will, we will graduate to a much lower level of complexity. And, you know, that'll translate into a lower level of energy use, lower level of standards of living that are possible, lower levels of convenience, all kinds of things will be much lower than we want if we really want to maximize resiliency. One of the... It's the balance. It's the balance. Yeah, one of the areas that comes to my mind and relates to our past discussions and some of my reading on your website is the role of the insights of Indigenous people. Because there are some modern environmental writers who say, yeah, they looked at it differently, but that's because the world was different, number one. And others will say, no, we've got to, which might call, re-adopt that. I think you and I've discussed a book together, Jeff Nixon's book, The Lost Art of Heart Navigation. And he sourced his interest in the western part of Michigan around Indigenous rituals and Indigenous people. But others, I'll cite one of my podcasts with Elizabeth Colbert, the writer from the New Yorker and others who writes fabulous books, said, I don't know how Jermaine Indigenous thinking is. And now we come back to this, what I'll call media joust. When you act like you're going back, you look like a funny duddy, not like you're going forward, even though those guys were way ahead of where we are now in the vision of regenerative economics. Who do you cite? Indigenous writers, Black Elf Speaks, I mean, I'm just throwing them out there. Who do you cite that has sparkling insight now? There's a beautiful book called Braiding Sweetgrass. But, you know, here's how I think about it, Rob. I do believe the source of this regenerative thinking that I and others are now expressing goes back to Indigenous wisdom. In fact, it's interesting if you go back and read Neo-Confucianism, you'll find a lot of parallels as well, a much more holistic approach. So it's really wholism that is what's been lost in the modern age. And the rise of reductionist logic at the expense of keeping track of the whole is what got us what I would call lost. And in the sweep of human history, the modern age is a blip. And so I think we, in our pursuit of reductionist knowledge, we've lost track of our ability to see and understand the whole. And for sure, the Indigenous wisdom, you know, it's almost like it needs a translation because it's, because it is so old, it may seem out of context in a modern age. But, you know, there's that, what's that famous poet for all the, all our traveling, we're back to where we began or something. I'm terrible at remembering poetry, but I could dig it out. But the way I see it is that we've always known, you know, we are Indigenous at our core. And so we have in our consciousness this wisdom that the Indigenous, as I understand it, don't have a separate word for nature because they understand that humans are part of nature. So how could nature be a separate thing? And I think we've, you know, in not out of any malice, but we've gotten a bit lost and are reconnecting with who we really are, which is to me not going backwards, but spiraling forwards to a much higher level of knowledge and wisdom. And it will need to be modernized for the current context. But the basic premise that we're in relationship with Mother Earth, which is at the heart of Indigenous knowledge, is what we have to remember and relearn. And how that manifests is the great challenge of this era. But it's not, it's most certainly not, we just need to invent new forms of energy and then keep doing what we've been doing in the past. If we had free energy broadly distributed to everyone today, we would destroy ourselves faster than we're destroying ourselves right now. We need to relearn our place in the universe really. Yeah, that's right. I think your book on Braiding Sweetgrass is Robin Kimmerer. Is that right? Yes. Thank you. Yeah. And my guest is the T.S. Eliot was the poet. It is. It is absolutely T.S. Eliot. That one, that one resonated with me. I looked up Robin Kimmerer because I've not, I want to read that book myself. I'll tell you a gentleman who I found fascinating. I had as a guest on this podcast months ago is Urban Laszlo. He's a Hungarian who synthesizes in his Akashic field discipline, as he calls it, Eastern philosophy with science. Nice. And it's really fascinating how, because he thinks, as you referred to a little bit earlier, how intuitiveness brings things out. There's a channel of discovery that isn't ground out through logic. It comes from those, which you might call higher spiritual channels. And yet they are to use your regenerative and actually they are wholly integrated with that conscious body that's marching around like a mechanical engineer or an economist. And he doesn't want to throw out the mechanical engineering or economics, because it's a part of the illumination. Exactly. But we're not on a healthy path unless we can integrate the two. And that's why some people are referring to this as the integral age. I like to use the regenerative age. I personally don't think we get to get to the integral age if we don't master the regenerative age. But honestly, my search has been an intuitive driven search, certainly not a mathematically, mathematics or analytical driven search. And we were talking before the recording, my success on Wall Street in Japan and my discovering the arbitrage between of all things Yen Swaps and Yen Bon futures was an intuition much more than a, I didn't work out the math first. It was all intuition. And so I think we're trying to solve these problems relying on only half our brain. And and as West Jackson says so beautifully, one of my teachers, there's nothing wrong with the reductionist method, so long as we don't confuse the method with the way the world usually actually works. I used to marvel when I was in the hedge fund business. I always felt like I sat next to the Michael Jordan of traders in Stanley Druckenmiller. Yeah. And he used to just go up and down, up and down and up and down, always making money in the 30 year bond. And I said, how do you do this? And he says, I don't know. I just feel it. It's really being good to me. It was almost like he had an unconscious trust relationship that the bond was letting you see where it was going. And that was, you know, he was being playful. I'm not mocking him at all. But his intuitive awareness was just uncanny. And I think that's a level of greatness. You know, George Soros used to tell me when we were trading currencies and what have you, you can tell when you're wrong, because you get things like nausea or lower back aches. The body tells you before the mind realizes, but you got to listen to it. So I think some of these, how would I say, these intuitive realms that you're exploring are quite present among... And that is, you know, that's a way to understand Indigenous wisdom, right? You don't literally need to try to understand, you know, the literal meaning of a rain dance or whatever. These are ways to express something that's much more intuitive rather than analytical, I think. And one of my board members and founders, Bill Janeway, who's always venture capitalist, Warburg Bankus and so forth, he says, when you're really doing innovation, you can't operate like an economist because you can't know the outcome. And you have to have failures and successes. And yes, you may know a lot of things about the techniques and things, but you don't, and you may have visions of the outcome, but you don't know that it's coming. You have the courage to explore at the risk of failure. Well, and that's one of the cool things about living systems is that there is, you know, in fact, after I read Yolana Whatz's book, I was tempted to add a ninth principle, which is chance or uncertainty or unknowable. But there's, you know, unlike our understanding of Darwin where it's random chance, when you add diversity with this unknown variable, you get new possibilities, new potential that is impossible to know in advance. And the reason I remain hopeful about our current predicament is that, and I've seen this in my investment practice. So I know this is real, at least on, you know, on bench scale projects. But the idea of aligning with these patterns and principles and not picking one or two, but literally creating the conditions for the health of a whole system by aligning the entire system with the way living systems work, is that living systems unlock immense potential that no one could have foreseen, including the potential for life itself. I mean, life didn't used to exist on this planet and it does now. And, you know, the example I like to use because it's so basic is, if one of the principles is right relationship, symbiotic relationship, think about the potential unleashed when 201 oxygen get together in right relationship. You have water. Well, before water, you would never have imagined life. But that's true in business enterprise and in relationships, constructive relationships between the private sector and the public sector, you unlock potential that previously was unknowable and unseeable. And so the, you know, the arithmetic on dealing with climate change in a realistic way is daunting. But through, you know, one of the principles is innovation, adaptation and response, responding to changing context. There's tremendous opportunity for solutions that we currently don't see because we haven't aligned with these same patterns and principles. And, you know, there's plenty of examples of that showing up in the real world, as we speak. So it's very hopeful. Well, I share the possibility of hope. But they always say, I go always back to Gerald Jampalski's book, Love is Letting Go of Fear. And I'll just bring up a current episode. There are a lot of people in West Virginia that are afraid to give up in the coal sector. But almost every environmental study that I've read, IPCC or whatever suggests that we've got to stop using coal. But I heard from a friend of mine who knew I was from the Detroit area, a story recently where he said he was talking about what can we do to transform West Virginia? And the fellow said, my father and his brother were coal miners. My father thought things were exciting in Detroit. He went to Detroit. And then with automation, globalization, he got crushed and committed suicide. And my father stayed a coal miner. And he said, the world won't take care of West Virginia any more than it took care of Cleveland and Detroit, given our politics. And that ignited something in me. It's my friend was nudging me with this story that if we're thinking about what you might call a new vision and wholesome transformational dynamics, we've got to get to a place where we innovate in being more inclusive in understanding the winners and losers in the transition than we were in the case of machine learning, automation or globalization, particularly vis-a-vis the size and scale of China. And because I see the hope on the horizon, I see you can see some of the ways in which we can do better. But to get from here to there, we've got to stop the resistance and the fear which impedes it, some of which is justified by experience. Well, I mean, I'm glad you raised the inclusive issue. Again, let's get back to the basics of how living systems behave as a point of departure. One of the principles that I talk about is called empowered participation. That's not an idea I made up. That's from reading about living systems. And what that means is that all parts of the system are empowered to participate in the health of the system. And so, for example, going back to the human body, our feet and our toes are empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen. That's not just because our body feels sorry for our toes and wants to help out our toes and take care of our toes. It's because if our toes aren't healthy and our feet aren't healthy, we can't fulfill our potential as human beings. So what we have to learn is that the health of humanity is harmed when the coal miners in West Virginia are not empowered to participate in some new way in the economy we need. So it's not a charity thing. It's not a bleeding heart liberal thing. It's a systemic health thing. If we don't understand now that just look at what happened with our politics and the extreme, the whole Trumpian response, we've neglected in a sense the parts of the system, the parts of our body, so to speak, for so long and allowed it to atrophy so poorly that we saw a response. And it wasn't a rational, healthy response. It was an angry, violent response. But I'll give you, Trump did come out and say things like the system is rigged. He spoke to the Detroit Economic Club and he said shame on the big three management for not preserving jobs in this country. He looked at the TV camera in 2015 in Miami and said, Jeb Bush may be a good governor. I have a home here. He was a good governor. I'm paraphrasing. But he said they're not cheering for him and booing for me because the people in the audience are the RNC donors. And those are the people we have to defeat. Now, what person ever had the intuition to take on the poor donors of their own party when they sought the nomination and prevailed. But it's the illness of our cumulative neglect in our society. Something that Alex Gibney and David Sirota are talking about in Meltdown, which is their eight hour podcast on the great financial crisis and the loss of trust and faith and expertise and governance in America. Trump is a symptom of that. And the next leader, if despair were to continue, if the neglect of West Virginia analogously around the country continues, we're still in that cauldron. Absolutely. And I'm glad you raised the financial crisis again, Rob, because there's a couple of interesting... I've recently become quite intrigued with this whole cryptocurrency phenomenon after trying to resist it and reject it for a couple of years. There's a couple of interesting things I've learned. One is just to observe that Bitcoin arose the year after the financial crisis, although obviously it was in the works for a while before that. But what I learned is quite interesting is that it actually arose as a protest against mismanaged, corrupt, emerging economies. And so if you live in a country that is horribly mismanaged with depreciating currencies, you're going to find something like Bitcoin very interesting. And the DeFi movement really, I think, is a response to the lost trust of the financial system. I think the financial crisis was sort of the final stake in the heart of any notion of trust in the financial system. And so now it's moving into this DeFi crypto sphere, which is going to have all kinds of problems. It's the same speculative casino moved into a deregulated, decentralized crypto world. But what's fascinating is that the blockchain technology actually seems to enable the possibility of a more regenerative financial system if the regenerative principles are wired into the DNA of new currencies. And there are some really thoughtful people in the crypto world who are very intrigued with the idea of coding directly into new currency, the patterns and principles of living systems. So I think we're in a, you know, this is a long way of saying, I think we're in a necessary, you know, the shot has been fired. Society has lost trust in the banking system and in institutions broadly. And we're now in this, you know, unknowable, scary, volatile, you know, what happens with that energy as it reorganizes itself into something that can either go really poorly or hopefully be much more healthy. And my bet is that if we can if we can land the idea that healthy living systems behave in certain ways that we understand, we'll actually be able to co-create a system that reflects that. And we'll do a better job than just trying to regulate a system that's built on, you know, that's now dominated by lost trust and malfeasance, to be honest. Yeah, many of my friends that were in the financial sector were concerned after the Great Financial Crisis about the reputation of finance. And one of the CEOs of a major bank said to me, you're watching all of these apps being built where people are going to manage their own portfolio on an app. And I said, well, what do you think of that? He said, they don't trust us that our various outposts or our branch offices to manage portfolios on their behalf anymore. So they're going to go try and do it on their own. And, you know, God bless them, but they may really, really suffer or be subject to fraud or what have you because it's, it's out there. Yeah, I mean, Robin Hood is terrifying to me, the whole Robin Hood phenomenon, but it's a direct reaction against the man. And so we, we in finance have brought it on ourselves. And, you know, I'm sure it's not going to be pretty, it's going to, you know, it's going to go through convulsions. But, but that's the way living systems react to, you know, radical change in context. They, they, they reorganize themselves and, and it's likely to have some violent repercussions. Or he has, I think, I think, you know, from my perspective, on behalf of my audience and myself, John, I, I appreciate how you've devoted your life to trying to see that positive path, envision it, understand the underpinnings. You're quite aware of the emotional contours. And I just, you know, I don't know that many people that have really dug in and gone to that place and committed their life to that. So I want to applaud you, but also thank you for that. And when I see the, which I might call the human, the heart based integration that you've brought together with your experience and your awareness of the, you know, the paradigms, the frameworks and so forth. When you've been able to go into yourself and feel the discord, we talked at the outset about what were those little things getting under your skin disturbing you and feel the discord and acknowledge it and explore it. That's it. That's a kind of confidence that every human, I wish every human being could have because you're going to be more satisfied with your life. You're going to have prouder children and grandchildren and you may darn well help this world get to a better place as a result of that energy, that courage, that insight and how you focused yourself. Well, thanks, Rob. That coming from you, that as someone who I admire greatly, who's obviously committed your life to the pursuit of a better and more just society, that means a lot to me. I appreciate it. And, you know, we're only at the beginning of this journey. I know there's lots of people in your community out there who know the current economic system is messed up and broken. There's a Nobel Prize waiting for some smart young academic who's going to figure out how to turn regenerative economics into a formal theory. I have no doubt. So I would encourage people to join this effort. And, you know, one way they can do that, I'll just make a shameless plug. We're actually launching our first ever course on regenerative economics in March of next year. Rob is going to be a participant in it. We've got a group of thought leaders to help us dialogue around this challenge. And that will be the first of several courses. There'll be a regenerative finance course to follow. And someday it may all, if our plans come true, culminate in the creation of a cryptocurrency that embeds living systems in the DNA of the economy itself. So it's an exciting journey and I'd welcome everyone to join. You can find out information about it on our website at capitalinstitute.org.