Episode #288
John Fullerton: Regenerative Economics For A Living World

John Fullerton argues that the economy should be understood not as a machine to be optimized, but as a living system embedded within the biosphere. His framework of regenerative economics emerged from a career on Wall Street, being heavily influences by Dana Meadows’ book Limits To Growth, and firsthand experience with Allan Savory’s Holistic Management International. Fullerton explains why conventional economics ignores ecological limits, treats pollution and inequality as externalities, and rewards extraction at the expense of resilience. Drawing lessons from grasslands, forests, cooperative businesses, farmers’ markets, and other living systems, he describes an economy organized around right relationships, empowered participation, robust circulation, and the health of the whole.

Our interview with John Fullerton has been edited and condensed for clarity:

You can subscribe and download episodes of our show through your favorite podcast app, our YouTube channel, or stream the audio-only version here:

Dave Chapman interviewed John Fullerton at his home in June of 2026

Dave Chapman 0:00
I’ve had big conversations. Do you know Zephyr Teachout.

John Fullerton 0:03
Yeah. I don’t know her. I know who she is.

Dave Chapman 0:05
She’s wonderful. She’s come to our conference a bunch, and I’ve interviewed her a bunch. She’s come up to my house. She grew up close to me.

John Fullerton 0:12
Yeah, that’s right. She’s from Vermont.

Dave Chapman 0:14
Yeah, she’s from Vermont.

John Fullerton 0:15
When she was running, someone connected us, and we tried, and then we never…

Dave Chapman 0:20
She’s a lovely person, but also an important thinker. She has three books, but the book that I’m most connected with is called “Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.” It’s really about anti-monopoly. She was buddies with Lina Khan. They came up together, and Lina happened to be the one that went to the FTC and really started something.

John Fullerton 0:45
Yeah, she was great.

Dave Chapman 0:47
But I asked Zephyr about this question of Driscoll’s. It puts out what I would call fake organic, but the fake organic, at least the domestic stuff, does not have pesticides sprayed on it. The imported stuff, I think a lot of it does. But the domestic stuff does not. Is it wrong of us to object so strenuously both to their practices and to the fact that they are a monopoly?

Dave Chapman 1:10
I said, “Am I wrong? It’s an honest question.” She said, “No, you’re not wrong, Dave. Because a monopoly will always behave in a certain way over time. It’s inevitable. They cannot help but do what they need to do for their own benefit. It’s the system.”

John Fullerton 1:43
It’s gravity.

Dave Chapman 1:43
It’s the system. It’s not about a good person or a bad person. Miles Reiter, no doubt, is a great person, but it’s what you do in that system. It’s what the system rewards and encourages. It’s what a lot of your work really highlights. Here we are.

Dave Chapman 2:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast, and welcome to John Fullerton. John, thank you for taking the time today. This is a conversation I’ve been looking forward to.

John Fullerton 2:10
My pleasure.

Dave Chapman 2:11
Honestly, the topics are too big to talk about in one interview. There’s too much here, but I want to make an appeal to you that a lot of civilians and a lot of farmers will listen to this interview. It will not be economists. They will not necessarily be people getting a master’s or a PhD. But these things that you talk about are very relevant to them. They’re important. Just try to bring us along. I’m going to ask you to go back and do a little bit of remedial work here.

Dave Chapman 2:52
I’d like you to go back, and I know you’ve told your story many times. It’s an interesting story, and I want to start there because I think that it will ground people in you as a person. How did this happen? How did you get to this? How did you get to this, John? You started as a banker out of college, right?

John Fullerton 3:14
Don’t worry. Economists do not listen to me. I’m used to a non-economist audience for sure. My story – I went to Wall Street right out of college. It was a long time ago. I was a naive kid, to be honest, and I did not go to Wall Street thinking I was going to become rich. I went there because I was interested in the global economy, and international finance was how money flowed through the global economy, and that was what I studied in college. I went to learn.

John Fullerton 3:54
I often use this analogy. I was sort of like the kid who went to the Vietnam War thinking he was fighting for justice, and then woke up realizing I was in a different war than I thought I was in. But I had a great career. I worked at J.P. Morgan the whole time, almost 20 years. This was the late 1980s and the 1990s. I left in 2001 after the merger with Chase, which really changed the culture of the place.

John Fullerton 4:26
I was very lucky. I caught the derivatives wave in Tokyo, London, and New York, right at the beginning, before derivatives became a dirty word, which is an interesting lesson in what happens to technologies that start out with a useful purpose and can be corrupted. The same story is playing out with social media, obviously, and we will see what happens with AI.

John Fullerton 4:50
But I left after the merger mostly because I could. The merger meant your stock options vested. I had been itchy to get out for a while, but I did not know what I wanted to do, and so I just left with no plans. I took the summer off. That was my only commitment to myself, and I had gotten involved in what we now call impact investing, which is this idea of aligning investment capital with some social or environmental purpose beyond just profits.

John Fullerton 5:25
Back in 1997, that was not a thing, and I invested in a charter school company, actually, when I was still at Morgan. Anyway, in the fall, the first meeting I had back in New York to think about what I wanted to do next was with a charter school CEO, a different CEO.

John Fullerton 5:42
I was thinking of setting up a nonprofit charter school because the company I invested in always ran into political headwinds because they were making money off of children, which is an interesting challenge. But they did create great schools.

John Fullerton 5:59
Anyway, the meeting happened to be at 9:30 in the morning on what turned out to be 9/11, and it was in Lower Manhattan. At 9:10, I was in the subway, and this guy came in and said they just flew a plane into the World Trade Center. He announced that in our subway car.

John Fullerton 6:17
I thought it was a little Piper Cub or another private plane or something. I got to the street to witness the second plane exploding. I do not have a job, do not have a career, and I do not know what I want to do…

Dave Chapman 6:29
You saw that plane hit the World Trade Center.

John Fullerton 6:32
I saw it the moment after. I saw the explosion.

Dave Chapman 6:37
Yeah. I just asked that because you’ve actually been a witness to two major things happening: the total shift of investment banking, and then 9/11.

John Fullerton 6:53
Yeah. There’s another story along the way that I’ll come back to, if you want. I was far enough away to be safe, but close enough to be able to see whether the people standing at the window were men or women. Maybe that’s a way to think about it. I could see the curtains flowing.

John Fullerton 7:13
It took me all day to get home, and now I was really perplexed: What was wrong with me that I did not want to keep doing what I was good at? What was going on in the world? What was the future my kids were going to grow up in? I went into my deep thinking period, probably clinically depressed as well. Interestingly, it was mostly about who I was rather than what was happening in the world because I was 41 years old, and I did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up, that kind of thing.

John Fullerton 7:46
But that gave me the opportunity to read books. I just buried myself in books. I would get up from the dining room table after dinner, go to Barnes & Noble, and just collect books that would find me, with no particular curriculum. One of the books I read must have suggested or referenced “The Limits to Growth,” which was the 1972 MIT study that was very controversial at the time, but was translated into a whole bunch of languages.

John Fullerton 8:29
I think it sold 10 million copies. It essentially said that in the 1970s, if we continued doing what we were doing with economic growth, the system could collapse, and it did not predict an exact date. It was not even a prediction. It was a bunch of scenario analyses.

Dave Chapman 8:48
Can I interrupt for a moment?

John Fullerton 8:49
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 8:51
I knew Donella Meadows, the lead author of that, and I had never read her book. I look back and I think, “God…”

John Fullerton 9:00
Yeah, she was another Vermontant.

Dave Chapman 9:01
She was wonderful. She taught in the environmental studies department at Dartmouth. I think I knew her from cutting up cheese at the co-op or something, or putting out walnuts. She was just a lovely person. Some years later – and she died young.

John Fullerton 9:22
Yeah. She died the same year I left Wall Street, didn’t she?

Dave Chapman 9:28
Yeah. She was dead by the time that you read her book.

John Fullerton 9:31
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 9:32
yeah. I dedicated my book to her.

Dave Chapman 9:35
That’s right. That book was important, and she was an important person in my little world too. I’m reading the book now, and I’ve listened to her speak over and over. There are not a whole lot of recordings, but the ones that are available are excellent.

John Fullerton 9:52
No podcasts in those days.

Dave Chapman 9:53
No podcasts, but she gave a great talk at the University of Michigan. It was an hour and 15-minute talk about “The Limits to Growth” and systems thinking. You’ve really studied this. Could you explain to people – maybe they will go and read one of the versions of “The Limits to Growth” – what blew you away, and what was the basic thinking that was so powerful?

John Fullerton 10:22
In fact, there have been two sequels to “The Limits to Growth.” I’m pretty sure the first one I read was called “Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.”

Dave Chapman 10:34
that was the second sequel. The first one was “Beyond the Limits to Growth.” You read the latest book first.

John Fullerton 10:42
Right, which was still probably at least five years old when I read it. I read it probably in 2004, soon after I had left Wall Street. But the good thing about reading that book first, so that’s the one I would recommend, is that it was written after the fact, so it was looking back at the scenarios, the predictions, and the different models.

Dave Chapman 11:08
As I say, they’re not predictions.

John Fullerton 11:09
Yeah, they’re not predictions. Those are different scenarios of how…

Dave Chapman 11:13
Of how the world might play out depending on what we do and and what happens in reality.

John Fullerton 11:21
The baseline case, I forget what it’s called. It has a name, but the base case was that economic growth would continue at two or three percent a year in the West. I cannot remember what they assumed about China and India’s growth rates, but probably faster. With that economic growth is an expansion of what they call the material throughput: more energy, more stuff out of the ground, more waste, and more pollution.

John Fullerton 12:30
The thing that struck me is that, of course, economic growth is the base case of our whole global economy. Our pensions are leveraged to growth. Our government budgets are leveraged to growth. The whole Social Security system is dependent on continuous growth, and business profitability benefits tremendously from growth. If you sell more tomatoes next year than you did this year, and your costs stay the same, you make more money.

John Fullerton 12:48
It’s a pretty simple equation that growth, in terms of all of the things we focus on in economics, creates all of these positive benefits. But what we do not measure are what the economists call externalities, like the pollution that no one pays for, or, most dramatically, climate change, that no one is accountable for, or responsible for, or limited from contributing to.

John Fullerton 13:06
What struck me as a financier is that the whole logic of finance, what I now call the finance algorithm, not only depends on growth, but it forces the system to keep growing by design. It’s not a question of debt versus equity. All of it. The capital does not flow unless the investor or the bank can see that the capital will generate a financial return.

John Fullerton 13:41
The financial return is most often connected to some growth in the material throughput, what they call the ecological footprint of the economy: the use of resources, and the creation of pollution. None of that was profound until the economy got so big that it was breaking the biosphere. We now have Planetary Boundaries measurements, which are telling us that we’re breaking the ecosystem functions that we’re dependent upon.

Dave Chapman 14:26
Okay. Let me jump in just for a second. When Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the same year that we declared independence from England, he wasn’t imagining running up against limits to growth, ecological limits, that we were going to run out of resources. That was not in anybody’s imagination in 1776…

John Fullerton 14:54
As far as I can tell, yeah.

Dave Chapman 14:56
…because the population was so low relative to the resources. As the population grew, it started drawing down the resources, and eventually it hit a point where they crossed. However, at that point, there was not a great alarm being raised because that’s the nature of systems thinking.

John Fullerton 15:37
Think about it as a savings account. Let’s say you’re making $100 a year and spending $110 a year, but you have $1,000 in the bank. Nothing happens in year one. There’s no problem. Nothing happens in year two. But eventually, you’re drawing down that savings, and all of a sudden, you’re spending more than you’re earning, and there’s no buffer – there’s no cushion.

John Fullerton 15:32
The biosphere has massive buffers, the ability to respond, and whatnot. We’ve been able to play this game for centuries, even though we’ve been, for certainly the last 50 years, clearly drawing down more than we’re replenishing.

Dave Chapman 16:12
Now, Donella talked about Herman Daly’s three metrics for what would be a sustainable system. The first would be to not use a renewable resource at a quicker rate than it can renew itself. The second would be to not use a non-renewable resource quicker than you can replace it with a renewable resource. The third would be not to produce pollution as a result of your activity at a higher rate than the biosphere can absorb it. Those are the three things, and I think those are undeniable.

John Fullerton 16:58
You would think.

Dave Chapman 16:58
Nobody would disagree. We cannot just keep doing it. They might disagree that we are doing that, but they would not disagree with the idea, the logic that you cannot use a non-renewable resource.

John Fullerton 17:13
Yes. I guess I would agree and disagree. I think the challenge with Herman’s work – and Herman’s, he was one of my teachers. Ecological economics is the discipline that he and his colleagues created, literally kind of tangential to Donella’s writings. That all happened around the same time. Interestingly, a lot of things were happening right around that time in the early 1970s.

John Fullerton 17:40
The trouble is that if you look outside and see a sunny day, it does not feel like there’s a problem because all of these systems are so vast, and the changes that happen to them are so slow compared to our perspective. Our myopic idea of the long term for humans is 10 years, and these changes happen over much longer periods. Even now, the consequences of what we’ve done are not going to really hit us for another 25 or 50 years, even though they’re already baked into the system.

Dave Chapman 18:22
I know that we’re going to get there, but I’m just curious because one of the things that Donella definitely talks about, and Dennis Meadows has talked about, and you have talked about, is that yes, it seems very slow. You do not see the problem until suddenly the problem is huge and obvious. I think that would be called the time of overshoot.

John Fullerton 18:46
Yeah. Overshoot would be when the lines cross.

Dave Chapman 18:51
When the lines cross, but you still haven’t seen those collapses when you see the problem.

John Fullerton 18:56
The analogy I always use, and I did not make this up, is like the old joke: How did your company go bankrupt? The answer is slowly, and then quickly. How did the Berlin Wall fall? Slowly, and then quickly. This is actually the science. This is what Donella and Dennis Meadows studied and taught at MIT.

John Fullerton 19:20
This is actually one of the key points that I would want to share with the audience: we humans, particularly Western humans – obviously there are people who have learned this – have not really processed the difference between things that are complicated and things that are complex.

John Fullerton 19:46
Complex systems, like a farm, are not like a machine. A machine is complicated. A farm is complex. We cannot manage complexity the way we manage complicated systems. The phones or the cameras we’re using right now have a design that’s been refined into an optimal design, and the manufacturing process has been fixed such that it’s an optimal design, and the context is not changing.

John Fullerton 20:19
Whereas on a farm, the context tomorrow could be very different than the context today. That’s when systems collapse, when you do not adjust your behavior to the changing context. That’s remarkably, I would not say misunderstood, simply not understood. We’re ignorant of these issues.

John Fullerton 20:47
Going back to the history of the economics discipline, it’s actually more informative to look forward from Adam Smith roughly 100 years. You’re now living in a world where Newton’s science had become dominant. Newton’s the guy. He developed the mechanical laws that explain gravity in particular

John Fullerton 21:16
What happened is that a bunch of mathematicians and scientists decided they would turn the economics discipline that Adam Smith and others were creating, really as a philosophy – it used to be called political economy, and it was understood as a philosophy – into a science. They wanted to apply mathematics to it to make it a legitimate science.

John Fullerton 21:41
They literally borrowed Newton’s equations that were designed for a mechanistic system, and assumed they would apply to the economy. It’s that basic, the error.

Dave Chapman 22:02
They were applying the thinking of something that was complicated, but it was actually complex.

John Fullerton 20:22
Exactly. They assumed it’s a complicated machine – literally a machine. Irving Fisher literally built a model of a machine to model how the economy works. You can increase the input of money, and you can control it. We’re still suffering from that error. That error was never fixed.

John Fullerton 23:22
There’s been lots of modifications to what’s called neoclassical economics, but no one ever went back to the beginning and said, “Wait a second, we can’t build a discipline on a set of assumptions that an economic system mirrors a mechanistic system,” because an economic system is, first of all, it’s human beings; we’re not machines. It’s a human economy.

John Fullerton 23:22
It’s embedded – as Herman Daly made us aware – in the biosphere; it’s not a separate system from the “natural resources” that were depended upon. These early economists, they literally ignored the second law of thermodynamics. That was Herman’s genius.

John Fullerton 23:22
In fact, his teacher, a man named Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, wrote a book called “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process,” and modern economists have not acknowledged that neoclassical economics ignores the second law of thermodynamics. I’ll talk more about some of the other fundamental problems.

John Fullerton 23:22
But what blew my mind, I’d been a banker for 20 years, and no one ever talked about this. Certainly, no one was aware of it. There’s no one on Wall Street… I say no one. Very few people on Wall Street that run the big banks, that run the big hedge funds, would know that neoclassical economics ignores the second law of thermodynamics. I haven’t found one that knows that.

Dave Chapman 23:58
Can you explain what that means, that it ignores the second law of thermodynamics?

John Fullerton 23:59
The second law of thermodynamics. I’m not qualified to explain the entropy law, but to me, this is the idea that energy goes from being available to unavailable. To use an example: you have a log. There’s a lot of embedded energy in a log. If you light it on fire and burn it, it releases the heat. That’s the energy, and you’re left with ashes. There’s no way to turn the ashes back into a log.

John Fullerton 24:34
This is actually kind of a depressing reality about the material world we live in: that the world is moving from order to disorder, but something else amazing is happening, which is that life is happening. Somehow in the face of this entropy, which is apparently what the scientists are most confident about, is that the entropy law will never be overturned of any of the laws of physics.

John Fullerton 25:50
But remarkably, something else is happening at the same time, which is that evolution is happening. Life is complexifying, and progress in not just the human project, but the whole planetary project, is continuing to evolve in a positive direction.

John Fullerton 26:29
There’s this sort of offsetting force happening in the face of entropy such that somehow that entropy is manifesting more life, more complexity, and more variety, unless we interfere with that process. The cosmologists that I’ve studied with tell me this is a process that’s happening not just on this planet, but in the entire universe.

John Fullerton 25:50
This is actually the connection to this regenerative idea. The idea of regenerative agriculture is a manifestation of unseen potential manifesting if you create conditions for life to work on a farm, as opposed to destroying conditions for life using industrial methods of agriculture.

Dave Chapman 26:16
I really want to go there, but first I want to go back to “The Limits to Growth.” You read this book, and you were developing a new vision of reality.

John Fullerton 26:29
Reading “The Limits to Growth” for me, and particularly since I read “Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update,” so looking back, essentially “The 30-Year Update” said, yeah, we pretty much had it right. You can read a peer-reviewed science article that shows that their baseline scenario – obviously it wasn’t perfect, and the models they used were primitive compared to what we have today – but the basic idea they had was right.

John Fullerton 27:02
There’s a famous quip that anyone who believes that you can have exponential growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist. That idea is true. I don’t know how you could refute that idea. Plenty of people have tried, “Yeah, technology will fix it.” But there is some point where there’s an undeniable reality that the planet is not expanding.

John Fullerton 27:34
If we are using more and more stuff and turning more and more resources and energy into waste and pollution, at some point, the savings account is going to run dry, and bad things are going to happen. To answer your question, because… if I’m honest, I don’t know why reading this or learning this hasn’t created more of a reaction the way it did for me. I honestly don’t know because to me it was mind-numbingly obvious that this was an existential problem.

John Fullerton 28:14
I say in one interview, this is a “put your pencil down and rethink everything.” This is not a “Oh, it’s a problem to solve.” No, this is fundamentally, the entire economic system is built on a set of unsustainable assumptions. Assumptions that are false, giving us an unsustainable pathway. I couldn’t predict whether that was going to happen in 10 years, 20 years, or not in my lifetime, but eventually it couldn’t continue.

Dave Chapman 28:45
All of us live in that economic system.

John Fullerton 28:50
Right. We happen to live at the moment. This was the other thing that took me years to get comfortable with. Like, what are the chances, Dave, that you and I happen to live at the moment, not when the lines cross, but when the consequences become real?

John Fullerton 29:09
I’ll tell another quick story, which was again bringing home this point. We now talk about the polycrisis. This idea that there are these interconnected social, ecological, economic, financial, and now political crises that are sort of spinning out of control and feeding back on each other.

Dave Chapman 29:35
This is important because I know it’s a big deal for you. They’re interconnected. These are not independent crises that are happening, and it’s like, “Oh my God, there’s another one.” You’re saying that they are influencing each other, and as one crisis gets worse, it’s making the other crises worse.

John Fullerton 29:54
Yeah. Even within the ecological problems, they’re interconnected. It’s complex. We can’t literally get our heads around the consequences. What’s causing the political divisiveness and the move to extremes? Well, there’s probably 15 reasons, but some of them relate to the economic system. The economic system has political consequences, and certainly the effect of the ecological crises flows back into the economy in ways that hit us first in agriculture.

John Fullerton 30:36
Many of your audience know this from experience. This is not a theoretical thing. Just going back to how it affected me personally, I would go around talking to my banker friends as if I was like Paul Revere, like I discovered this thing. I mentioned earlier I was really in a tough mental place, like “What’s wrong with me?”

John Fullerton 31:08
I thought I had found my purpose, which is I worked on Wall Street at J.P. Morgan, arguably the most prestigious bank. I knew the people there. Then I’d learned this stuff, and those people needed to know what I’d learned. My job was to go tell them, because they kind of run the world. Once they understand it, then we can solve the problem.

John Fullerton 30:37
Not only did they not care, they didn’t see that it was a problem. To your point earlier, this is seemingly self-evident truth. But what I’ve learned over many conversations and now over two decades is that we humans are either not good at or are even incapable of changing our identities when our identity is in conflict with a reality that we discover.

Dave Chapman 32:10
You’ve told a story. I really thought it was significant. You were talking to one billionaire who had just retired from a great deal of his career, and you were explaining this to him, and you said he had his head down, and he said, “It’s too much. I can’t take it in.”

John Fullerton 32:35
I’ll be specific. This is a wonderful guy. This was not a billionaire in any derogatory way. I doubt he was a billionaire. I don’t know, but his name was Bill Harrison. He was a gentleman, a Southern banker who ran Chase when Chase bought Morgan. He was the guy that led the consolidation of the banking industry, and capped it off, capped off his career by…

John Fullerton 32:36
It was called a merger. But Chase bought Morgan and took over it. I had an opportunity to know him through long-term Capital Management, the hedge fund crisis. We knew each other. I left before I ever worked directly for him. But years later, I knew him well enough to say I’d like to have lunch with you.

John Fullerton 32:36
I was thinking, here’s someone who now has time because he’s retired, he’s got – you know – he can pick up the phone and call anybody in the world, and all I need to do is enlighten him about what I’d spent now a good five years wrestling with, and we’d go figure out what to do about it. Again, I need to emphasize Bill is a good human being, a caring human being, not the negative stereotype we might have for a Wall Street type.

John Fullerton 32:36
You’re right, I essentially did the exponential growth on a finite planet spiel, and he put his head down a little and he said, “It’s too big. I can’t go there.” What I interpret that to mean is that he at least intuited that if he went there, it would undermine his entire success story, because it was built on something so profoundly consequential in a negative way, that it would undermine his identity.

John Fullerton 32:36
I’ve had that experience many times with people now, where we don’t want to face facts that force us to question our identity. I think that’s a harder problem than doing the math on carbon emissions and whatnot. It helps explain why the “powerful people” are the last ones to see the problems that all of us “not powerful people” seem to think are obvious.

John Fullerton 32:36
That’s true. If you’re a tech billionaire now, and someone questions whether technology is going to solve this problem, you have to believe it will, because that’s your whole identity.

John Fullerton 32:36
For me, there’s some terrifying belief systems and statements coming out of our tech elite, who are the extreme example of, call it, left-brain analytical, logical problem-solving, complicated problem-solving abilities, without the balanced right-brain, imaginative, curious, holistic thinking ability to see the complexity as opposed to the narrow, complicated.

Dave Chapman 32:36
You quoted Einstein, perhaps in saying that without a theory, it’s not possible to see some things. I don’t know the exact wording.

John Fullerton 32:45
Again, it may be a misquote, but the idea is what really landed with me. He said something to the effect that it’s the theory that determines what we’re able to see. What I interpret that to mean is that most people that are out trying to do good in the world are building models of a solution. “Show me that I can build an organic farm that’s profitable, that can survive in the system, and if I prove I can do it, it tells you it’s possible.”

John Fullerton 37:14
Einstein would say, “Seeing is believing,” or we would say, “Seeing is believing. Show me an example,” which is obviously true. But what Einstein is suggesting is the opposite is also true. That believing determines what we’re able to see. Neoclassical economics is the theory that we all subconsciously…

John Fullerton 37:39
Anyone who’s studied economics, that’s what they’ve studied by and large. Anyone who even thinks about the system is thinking about a system that is the system of a machine logic.

Dave Chapman 37:52
I don’t think it’s limited to people who think about the system. I think everybody in the system is like “The Matrix.” Everybody just believes this story.

John Fullerton 38:02
The thing is, the story works the way it’s designed. You can’t deny that it’s true. If your sales increase, you’re going to make more money.

Dave Chapman 38:16
If you do these things you will have an easier life for now.

John Fullerton 38:21
Yeah. If business in general grows, profits increase, then stocks go higher, and my savings account, my pension, gets larger. I want those things to happen.

Dave Chapman 38:33
That’s right. When you come in and say, “Well, that’s not quite right,” you seem a little like a crazy person. How do you deal with that? I truly do see what you’re talking about, which is that it’s so hard to imagine… People talk about capitalism, and I always go, “I don’t really want to talk about capitalism,” because it’s like Mount Everest sitting on my shoulders.

Dave Chapman 39:05
How do we change this thing? It’s too big. But how do we change something that we know needs to be changed? That’s the question.

John Fullerton 39:16
If I had a good answer for that, I’d be working on it. For me, that is the great work of this moment. It is that we’re waking up to this idea. I’m by far not the only one who’s… Herman Daly talked about this 50 years ago. What’s different about my work is that I think I have a pathway through this, which we’ll talk about, which is a new thing. But the first thing we need to do is get clear on the mess we’re dealing with.

John Fullerton 40:05
The consequences of having built an entire global system on an idea that was fundamentally flawed. But it wasn’t flawed in the short term; it was only flawed in the long term. It could work for a while because effectively we were drawing down the savings account.

John Fullerton 40:31
Another way to think about the savings account is the resilience of human beings. But we’ve drawn down the resilience of human beings because as it gets tougher to grow the system, for all kinds of reasons, we put more pressure on the “labor.” We extract more from the planet, and we extract more from labor, and we extract more from management.

John Fullerton 40:44
It’s not much fun being a senior manager in many of these businesses these days. Their well-being is being extracted in order to keep the game going because we’re reaching the… When I started in derivatives, we used to joke, “This is the easiest job there is.” Marketing involves answering the phone. It was easy. Whereas now, it’s hard, and the pressure to keep making more money from a higher base makes it that much harder because it’s exponential.

John Fullerton 42:22
Everyone’s under intense pressure, which is having consequences on society, and it’s obviously having consequences on the planet. We happen to live at the moment when the chickens are coming home to roost. It’s either a really depressing story because there’s a whole movement now around degrowth. Like if growth is the problem, degrowth must be the answer. Well, no. That’s the same mechanistic thinking.

John Fullerton 42:18
There must be a way. If you think about how life goes through cycles – living systems go through cycles. Yes, a forest may burn down, but it creates the conditions for a new forest to grow that’s going to be healthier than the old forest. The reason that I’ve remained hopeful, and the reason I’m so passionate about this regenerative process, is that is the process that explains how life works.

John Fullerton 42:18
If we can align our economy with that process, which is something that farmers understand, and by the way, this is where I got this idea: working in agriculture. In my case, it was grasslands.

Dave Chapman 42:48
Let’s talk about Allan Savory. I know Allan and have interviewed him a number of times. He’s actually a tough guy to interview. I really like and respect him.

John Fullerton 43:09
I’m sure he’s a tough guy to interview.

Dave Chapman 43:09
He’s a tough guy to interview, and it’s even worse when he starts interviewing you. Don’t ask me what I think about that. We all laugh about it, those of us who have met Allan and gotten to know him, but I think it’s a very important thing.

Dave Chapman 43:26
Can you talk about how you met Allan? Really talk about what you learned from him. Don’t just sum it up in a sentence. I’d really like to understand that process for you.

John Fullerton 43:37
Maybe I’d also even describe a little bit. My encounter with Allan is an example of what has been pulling my search forward, which is a series of synchronicities that are crazy. I think there’s a lesson in this because we’re all convinced that we’ve got to figure out our problems.

John Fullerton 44:02
There’s something else going on in this universe. I don’t want to get too out there. You’re talking to someone who was at wit’s end, can’t figure out what I want to do, and can’t figure out why I don’t know what I want to do, and then these coincidences started happening. My meeting with Allan is an example.

John Fullerton 44:40
I’m sure you’re a fan of E.F. Schumacher, one of the early real thinkers about what’s wrong with economics. One of my first destinations in my search was the Schumacher Society up in Massachusetts. A few years later, Susan Witt, who still runs the Schumacher Center, invited me to write a chapter for a book that was going to be published to celebrate what would have been Fritz’s 100th birthday.

John Fullerton 45:14
His daughter was working on this. I don’t think the book ever was finished. But I wrote this chapter, and it was called “The Relevance of Schumacher for the 21st Century.” Hazel Henderson, who I had met, another one of the great formative thinkers about what’s wrong with economics, sent it to Allan Savory.

John Fullerton 45:39
I met Susan Witt, I happened to write this piece. It didn’t get published, but a different person sent it to Allan Savory, who says he received it sitting in Zimbabwe in his “mud hut.” He sent me an email saying, “I’d like to talk to you.” Believe it or not, I’d actually already heard of this guy because I was hanging around organic farmers and regenerative ag, and I think I had seen a talk at Stone Barns about rotational grazing, and so he was the guy.

John Fullerton 46:11
I literally ran into the house, ” Sue, I got an email from Allan Savory.” Why did he write me? Well, he saw in what I wrote a finance guy who kind of was thinking holistically, is what he would say. To make a long story short, he came to visit. We got to know each other. They were at the point of wanting to essentially get some land under management, so they could prove over a long period of time that this holistic grazing system would create lasting improvements on the grasslands, on the ranch lands.

John Fullerton 46:58
There’s so many synchronicities that happen here, but I ended up finding a partner, Larry Lunt, who together we acquired some land out in the United States, out west, and built a company to manage this land in accordance with this holistic management practice, with the idea of not just measuring our financial results, but measuring the ecological benefits on the ground over a sustained period of time, and even measuring carbon sequestration, which is very complicated, as you know, in soil.

John Fullerton 47:37
It turns out that Larry Lunt’s brother had been trained by Allan Savory, which I had no idea. His father was a rancher in Cuba. There’s all these crazy things. All of a sudden, here I am, I’m an East Coast water rat, coastal creature, out on ranches in the middle of Montana with a group of cowboys, which is not my place.

John Fullerton 48:04
I was literally standing on a ridge in Montana. It was just Allan and I, and he was pointing to the ground, showing me all the problems with, there’s too much space between the plants, and this plant’s not healthy. None of it was that interesting to me.

John Fullerton 48:19
I’m looking out at this beautiful horizon, and just kind of letting my imagination wandering. It occurred to me there that if this idea of holistic decision making, which is really the key, it’s not really about grasslands and cattle; it’s holistic decision making. If this can be used to manage the complex system we call the grasslands, and it obviously could because we were unlocking potential that the other ranchers never saw.

John Fullerton 48:53
In other words, we were grazing using more animals to create more disturbance to heal the land, which grew more grass, sequestered more carbon, retained more water, and created more biodiversity, by doing something radically different than the conventional wisdom.

Dave Chapman 49:09
And you saw it work.

John Fullerton 49:10
I saw it work. I invested my own money in it, so I was at risk that it would work, which tends to focus the mind. It’s not as simple as “Yeah, it worked great.” The weather changes. The first two years we were in business together, we had the worst droughts. There’s complexity in the story, but we certainly outperformed the other ranches in that region.

John Fullerton 49:40
In fact, there was one year where the neighboring ranches had to destock and sell off all their cattle. We reduced our cattle down to the stocking rate that the neighbors had done in good times. This was the analogy I gave. We bought an apartment building that was 10 stories high, but we were able to find five more stories to rent out compared to what the neighbors did. Just as a way to explain this to my finance friends.

John Fullerton 50:11
That has now been proven on millions of hectares around the world as a grazing system that not only reduces the degradation, but actually restores and regenerates the health of the land, and in the process, the health of the families and the communities that are working the land. I literally said to myself, standing on this ridge in Montana, “If this works on the living system called the grasslands, then why wouldn’t it work on the living system that I call the global economy?”

John Fullerton 50:47
That was one insight that no one had asked before. That’s a different insight than Herman Daly’s great work because Herman Daly’s work recognized the limitations, but it didn’t invite a different way of thinking about the system as a living organism to be managed holistically, as opposed to a machine to be managed in a way that didn’t destroy the machine.

Dave Chapman 51:18
Can I jump in? I got a lot of questions here. First of all, is this connected in any way to the Gaia hypothesis?

John Fullerton 51:27
One hundred percent.

Dave Chapman 51:28
Okay. Can you explain the Gaia hypothesis? Then we’ll go to the economy as a living system, huge thing. Can you explain to people what the Gaia hypothesis is?

John Fullerton 51:38
Probably not, but I’ll try. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis together developed this idea that we should see the planet as a living organism, not in the sense of it’ll have babies and create more planets, but as a complex, self-organizing, self-fueling, adaptive, responsive organism that continues to complexify – continues to go without anyone touching it or controlling it. It’s the self-organizing, self-maintaining aspect of it. It’s a miracle. Is that a resonable…?

Dave Chapman 52:35
That’s great. I’m just curious because I haven’t read Lovelock’s work. I’ve heard about it. But is the fact that there is a lot of life on Earth part of that? In other words, could Mars have a Gaia hypothesis, or is life necessary to be building the feedback that creates the atmosphere?

John Fullerton 53:01
I don’t want to speak beyond my understanding. I’m not a scientist. I’m certainly not an Earth scientist. I’m pretty sure that the scientific answer to that is that there’s something unique about this planet. I was just talking with Brian Swimme, a cosmologist. He would tell you that the entire universe is self-organizing and evolving. It’s literally mind-blowing.

John Fullerton 53:24
It gets to the question, “Where does my faith fit into this?” Because none of this you’re going to be able to “prove” to yourself to the level of like you can prove an equation like two plus two. But I’ve come to the point where I find this simply has… I experience awe thinking about it. It’s fantastic.

John Fullerton 54:14
To think that we’re despoiling this process, whatever it is, however it works, for me and I know for you, it’s like you can’t unsee it once you see it, and you can’t not work on this challenge once you process it as a possibility that what we’re doing with our economy is undermining the continuation of this healthy process to the point where it’s going to trigger some cataclysmic, not the world’s going to end, not everyone’s going to die, but like fundamentally negative and semi-permanent consequence just seems intolerable.

Dave Chapman 55:00
Yeah, we might be destroying the garden. You started to see the economy as a living system. Could you explain to me what that meant? That was a huge shift. You didn’t grow up and didn’t work with people who saw the economy as a living system. What does that mean, a living system?

John Fullerton 55:49
It’s a great challenge because all of my work rests on that premise that the economy is a living system. What is a living system? I would argue our bodies are living systems. A forest is a living system. As I’ve studied ecology, the discipline of ecology thinks about life in different ways.

John Fullerton 55:57
If you’re talking about systems ecology, you’re probably closer to studying living system science, but also if you study complexity science, you’re effectively learning about complexity, which is a description of living systems. But not all complexity continues to live. There are complex systems that collapse. What we’re interested in are the complex systems that somehow continue to evolve.

John Fullerton 56:43
My simple idea is, or the underlying logic of the assertion or the premise that the economy is a living system, is that one of the patterns that describes living systems from the microscopic to the cellular to the organ to the organism to the community to the biosphere to the universe is that there are patterns that repeat across scales. This idea of fractal patterns.

John Fullerton 57:01
If you look at a human body and our cardiovascular system, we have big arteries, mid-sized veins, and lots of small capillaries. If you look at a tree, you’re going to see something similar. The pattern above ground on a tree is similar to the pattern below ground. These patterns are everywhere in the living world.

John Fullerton 57:28
The idea of the economy as a living system is that if human beings are living systems, and a family is a living system, and a company is a living system, and an economy and a government agency is a living system – It’s not a machine. It’s a system. It’s either a machine or it’s a living organism. If it’s made up of living organisms, fractal logic would suggest it too is a living organism.

John Fullerton 57:58
By the way, then I started discovering that a lot of other people have been talking about companies as living organisms. I didn’t invent that idea. People have been thinking about this. But if companies are living organisms, and if government agencies are living organisms, and if nonprofits are living organisms, and if hospitals, even though they are buildings, are filled with people doing the work, if all those things are living organisms, correctly understood, then the economy is essentially the sum of all of them, working in some complex way that is hard to get our head around.

John Fullerton 58:38
But it behaves today as a very unhealthy organism. If it’s a living organism, it’s a very unhealthy one because it’s spitting out all these problems. These what the economists would call externalities or unintended consequences: pollution in the rivers, Climate Change, poverty, inequality, and mental health crises.

Dave Chapman 59:03
When they call them externalities, they’re sort of relegating them, saying that’s not really part of the economy. That’s somewhere else, which is an oxymoron because how can it not be?

John Fullerton 59:17
Yeah. That’s why you need to get to the root of the underlying assumption. The underlying assumption was that what we call the biosphere, which is not even a complete description, because the mountains, the atmosphere, and the minerals underneath the ground, those are all part of Gaia. They’re all part of this system. I don’t want to misstate the science, but one of my teachers, Jude Currivan, calls it the Gaiasphere. It’s all of these systems.

John Fullerton 1:00:01
The economists assumed that this was just natural resources as an input to the system, and so were people. We called them labor. Capital was there to organize natural resources and labor in such a way as to create profits for businesses. Products and services for end users, and profit as a result. It’s designed as a machine that generates profit as a result of the algorithm, and it does that.

John Fullerton 1:00:35
But it sees the Gaiasphere as natural resources, as an input to the system, as opposed to seeing the system as embedded in the Gaiasphere. It’s completely backwards. You can’t fix that. It’s such a fundamental flaw that you either go back and rethink it from the ground up. But what the discipline has done is call these externalities, and then say, “Well, let’s put a price on the externalities to bring the externalities into our machine.”

John Fullerton 1:01:09
But as Peter Brown, one of my teachers, said, “There’s a difference between a cost that you can fix with money and a wrong that you can never fix.” Take a baseball game. If there’s a baseball game in the neighborhood, and everyone leaves their litter on the streets, then someone has to pay for the litter cleanup crew to come in and clean up the litter. That’s an externality of the baseball game that can be fixed with money. You just pay the cleanup crew.

John Fullerton 1:01:45
But if it’s dumping CO2 into the atmosphere at a level that will reach four degrees of warming, that’s not a cost that can be fixed with money. Yet the economics discipline is trying to fix that problem by taxing pollution, but there’s no tax that can fix the problem if you go past a certain level.

Dave Chapman 1:02:11
You’ve told the story of the guy who got the Nobel Prize in economics, who said that we can’t afford… Could you tell us that? Just because I think it’s a perfect example of what you’re talking about.

John Fullerton 1:02:26
It’ll bring out another fatal flaw of the discipline. First I should tell you, the Nobel Prize in Economics is a fake Nobel Prize. It’s an interesting story. I don’t know what Mr. Nobel’s thinking was, but he clearly did not consider economics a science when he set up the Nobel Prizes for the sciences. Why he chose not to, I don’t know. There is no Nobel Prize in economics.

John Fullerton 1:04:29
But a group of neoclassical economists who essentially ran the Swedish Central Bank decided that there needed to be a Nobel Prize in economics to be given out along with all these other prizes in Sweden. They created a new prize, which is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Nobel family complained, but there is now a Swedish Central Bank Prize, which is considered the Nobel Prize in economics.

John Fullerton 1:04:29
In 2018, it was awarded… A quick little bit more background. We’ve talked about ecological economics, which is the big leap forward to recognize that the economy is embedded in the biosphere, Herman Daly, etc. There’s another discipline or branch of neoclassical economics, which is called environmental economics. It gets confusing.

John Fullerton 1:04:29
Environmental economics is, to oversimplify, the discipline that seeks to figure out how to price these externalities we just talked about in order to bring the costs of these externalities back into the system, which arguably is a good thing to do, all else equal. You’d rather have the pollution priced into the system than not. Right now, the price of this pollution is zero, so that doesn’t make any sense.

John Fullerton 1:04:29
One of the leading academics in this discipline of environmental economics is a Yale professor named William Nordhaus. Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2018 for his work on climate. He developed a model called the DICE model, as in roll the dice. I forget what it stands for. This model allowed him to conclude that the target we should shoot for in terms of global heating is 3.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline rate.

John Fullerton 1:05:57
He won the award three years after the Paris climate talks, where the scientific consensus was that we had to keep warming below 2 degrees, and we should do everything we can to keep it below 1.5 degrees. One point five degrees is the scientific consensus from the UN process. There’s controversy around that, but we know that story. But hundreds, if not thousands, of climate scientists buy into this 1.5-degree target.

John Fullerton 1:05:57
Yet the economics profession decides that 3.5 degrees is the right target because “anything lower will cost too much.” Cost too much in terms of foregone economic growth because there is a belief, and there’s some truth to it, that if you restrain carbon emissions, you’re going to restrain growth because so much of our growth is fossil fuel-driven, at least as of now.

John Fullerton 1:06:16
There’s so much growth in the underdeveloped economy that is a moral imperative, and so just getting the global South, the global majority, to a standard of living that is at a subsistence level requires energy, and therefore emissions, again, depending on what kind of energy we use.

John Fullerton 1:06:38
Here’s the thing: I’m sure William Nordhaus is not stupid, and yet his assumption was based on the ignorance of economics, which, going back to Newton, assumes that time is reversible. In Newton’s equations, time goes forward and backward, and so what Nordhaus must have been thinking is that if we have economic growth at a higher level, we’ll be richer, and so we’ll have more money to fix the problems in the future.

Dave Chapman 1:03:59
Thus reduce the 3.5-degree difference to reverse Climate Change.

John Fullerton 1:07:14
I cannot get inside his head, but that’s the only way I can rationalize it, because he had to know the climate science, and he had to conclude that these are problems we can fix. Here’s where it gets crazy. If you read his actual paper, I kid you not, it says that climate change won’t affect manufacturing much because manufacturing happens indoors. Yes, it’ll affect agriculture. I swear it says this. But agriculture is only five percent of the economy. It says that.

John Fullerton 1:07:58
That’s what the Nobel Prize committee must have read before they made the decision. The only way to get your head around how someone who’s clearly intelligent make such a, I would argue, ignorant – meaning, not stupid, just not knowing reality – conclusion is that he’s missing the fact that time is path-dependent. In other words, what happens today will change the possibilities of what’s possible tomorrow.

John Fullerton 1:08:37
If we go down this global heating path, we won’t be able to get back to 1.5 degrees because we may have unlocked feedback loops that no one even understands, or we may have unlocked feedback loops that people do understand, and we interfere with the Gulf Stream, and Europe gets frigid. It’s not like money can fix those problems.

John Fullerton 1:09:04
I would argue that, again, going back to Einstein, the theory determines what we’re able to see. The neoclassical theory that Nordhaus was trained on presumes that time is reversible, meaning you can run the experiment forward and backward. Meaning it doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow because we can always fix it the day after tomorrow. That’s just not true. That’s just factually wrong.

Dave Chapman 1:09:29
Thank you. Can I take a slight detour, perhaps? It’s just something that I’ve had to think about a lot lately. We have a conference coming up, and there will be a debate between a professor from Berkeley, Tim Holtz, professor of agroecology, and a man named Michael Grunwald. Michael writes a lot for The New York Times. He’s got a book called “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.”

Dave Chapman 1:10:01
He is very similar in his beliefs to George Monbiot, which is that we have to completely move our agriculture to very intensive, which means chemical production, because they believe that intensive chemical production is more productive per acre in yields than organic, based on limited research. Because of that, less land will be taken up by farming.

Dave Chapman 1:10:37
As we have population growth that we can’t seem to stop or slow down – even… Well, we’re slowing it down in this country, but not on the planet. Even though we’re slowing it down in this country, the population is still increasing. Their argument is to basically move to the Green Revolution throughout the world.

Dave Chapman 1:11:01
When I first heard this, it was from the chair of environmental studies at Dartmouth. I was preparing for a conference at Dartmouth, and Paul Hawken was going to be our keynote, so I was going to all the professors and saying, “Please bring your students.” He looked at me and he said, “Organic is worse for the climate than conventional agriculture.”

Dave Chapman 1:11:24
I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” He said, “Well, there’s this article in Nature, and it very clearly lays this out.” This is the same department that Donella Meadows was in 20 years earlier. This is taken very seriously in academia. It’s taken very seriously by the U.S. government. A lot of money is now shifting, where it’s going, why it’s going, and how it’s going. We can talk about that.

Dave Chapman 1:11:56
But my question is: I thought it was insane. I thought, “Okay, but we need to come up with a lucid response to this argument.” Do you have any thoughts about how you would respond to that? How do you feel about it? Is it the right question, even?

John Fullerton 1:12:14
This is a huge, complex question that I’m not an expert on. I can share what I learned through the grazing experience. What I know is true is that we conflate the problems of the industrial meat system, which requires growing grains, clearing the Amazon to grow more grains to feed more cattle. I’ve experienced ranches in the United States and have knowledge of them in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Argentina.

John Fullerton 1:13:02
All around the world, by shifting the management practice, you can easily double, if not triple, the stocking rates, meaning the animals per acre, on what are natural grasslands. The thought of cutting down a tropical rainforest to grow grass or to grow food for animals is industrial thinking that is very short-sighted. There is massive capacity to increase the animal stock on the existing grasslands of the world if they’re managed in a holistic way.

John Fullerton 1:13:46
Now, does that mean those animals are going to taste the way we’ve gotten accustomed to them tasting? A big, thick, juicy Texas steak comes from an animal that’s been fattened on grain to cause the animal to be unhealthy, to cause the animal to need antibiotics, to cause antibiotics to enter the water system, and to create problems with our response to antibiotics.

John Fullerton 1:14:12
No, it might need to taste different than the steaks that we Americans have gotten used to. But I’m convinced that if you just take the beef piece alone, there’s massive capacity to increase beef production where animals are eating grass, not grain. You’re not growing any grains to feed animals.

John Fullerton 1:14:41
But when people do the math on the food system, they assume we have to expand the industrial meat system, which means turning the tallgrass prairies of Iowa and Indiana into cornfields to feed cattle or to fuel our cars. The inefficiency or the land limitation problem is because we’re using our land for industrial agriculture, which doesn’t make any sense, not because what I would call organic regenerative agriculture systems are incapable of achieving the productivity that industrial agriculture does.

John Fullerton 1:15:26
It’s true that you can grow more corn per acre with chemicals than you can grow corn per acre without chemicals. But we should not be growing all that corn to feed animals when the Great Plains have been turned into cornfields. If they were turned back into grasslands, there’d be more room for animals to roam on the grasslands, which would be healthier for the animals and healthier for the planet.

John Fullerton 1:15:54
It’s an incredibly complex problem. This is actually something that I hope AI is going to help us understand better. What I just talked about is just meat, and just in the United States. When it gets to Africa, you have different land conditions, different crop possibilities, and I don’t know the answer to it.

John Fullerton 1:16:17
I believe with every bone in my body that if you treat agriculture as an industrial system, you will create unintended consequences that will be bigger problems than the problem of “poverty” we’re trying to solve in the first place. I think that’s been proven in India and in Africa.

Dave Chapman 1:16:40
I know we have to get to regenerative economics. Let’s go there, and then there’s a place I want to go at the end. You have been developing your way of thinking about economics that you think is more useful, and is more helpful to all of us if we can create a revolution in our thinking. This is really a big deal, which is that the stories we tell ourselves, whether we’re even aware of it or not, are actually creating the world that we live in.

Dave Chapman 1:17:19
If we believe something is impossible, we won’t even try. If we believe, “Of course, we should do that,” we will try it, and we will, by and large, succeed. Let’s talk about what you believe is possible.

John Fullerton 1:17:36
The first thing I might say is that people like you and the entire, call it the organic movement, the farmers’ market context, and the Farm to Table, that’s the regenerative economy. I’m just calling it something because if we call it farmers’ markets, it doesn’t seem like it’s the economy. It seems like it’s just a farmers’ market.

John Fullerton 1:18:07
But if you analyze what’s happening in the context of small farms, farmers’ markets, and Farm to Table, what’s probably the single most powerful word that will come to your mind?

Dave Chapman 1:18:25
The first word that comes to my mind is connection because you’re now dealing with an economy in which people actually know each other and trust each other.

John Fullerton 1:18:35
Exactly. The first principle of my regenerative economics, I use the language “in right relationship.” Same thing. Where did I come up with that? Well, I’ve studied living systems from the way the human body works to the way the grasslands work to the entire Gaia.

John Fullerton 1:18:59
It seems very clear that one of the first design principles – this is not like a principle like “be honest,” but literally a descriptive design principle – is that life works in symbiotic, win-win relationships, and it starts at the scale of the entire planet. The planet is in a right relationship with the sun and the moon, or we’re not having this conversation.

John Fullerton 1:19:29
All the way down to the relationship between cells in our bodies, to an organ, and the relationship between the organs in our bodies and the larger systems in our bodies. Living systems have this quality that they find niches, and they move in right relationship with each other. In our economy, we’re taught that it has to be competitive.

John Fullerton 1:20:00
Janine Benyus, the author of “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature,” and the driver behind the biomimicry movement, which is clearly a close cousin of what I’m talking about, said, “John, species go through a learning curve, a growth curve, and a maturation curve, where initially they compete, but then they find that it’s easier to cooperate than compete.”

John Fullerton 1:20:28
What she calls a level one system would be like a bunch of weeds, and they compete for all the energy, and they grow, and then they die. But then the system matures into perennials, and the perennials have co-benefits of multiple species on a grassland. The energy doesn’t all go into the flower. The energy goes into the root system. They become perennials – regenerative, sustainable systems over a long period of time.

John Fullerton 1:21:19
Ultimately, you get to a mature rainforest, which is filled with the complexity of interrelationships and co-benefits of all the different species working in harmony with each other.

Dave Chapman 1:21:19
At that point it’s a very stable system.

John Fullerton 1:21:20
Yeah, incredibly resilient. What the organic movement has done is show us, in that sector of the economy, the food sector, what a regenerative economy is. We’ve done like 50 stories of projects that we see as the regenerative economy, and we describe the principles, and the entrepreneurs or the practitioners, they say, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m doing.”

John Fullerton 1:21:54
I would argue the regenerative economy is everywhere. It’s just hidden in plain sight and often corrupted by the overarching dominant extractive system. I’ll give you a couple of other examples. But the idea is to think of the economy as a healthy living organism, which means we need to understand the first principles of healthy living organisms and then apply them to the economy.

John Fullerton 1:22:22
When people ask me, “Well, show me the regenerative economy at scale,” I often point to the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain. It’s a great story. In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, I think it was roughly 70 or 80 years ago. A Catholic priest recognized that they had to figure out a way for people to have work, both for their livelihoods, but also for their dignity.

John Fullerton 1:22:53
They just started building cooperative businesses where the workers owned the companies. Fast forward 70 or 80 years, and there’s now, I think, around 80 businesses. The total sales of all of these 80 businesses that are based in the Basque Country in Spain are 20 billion euros. They’re all cooperatively owned, meaning the workers own the businesses.

John Fullerton 1:23:27
Most people, when they study the Mondragon Cooperatives, come away thinking, “Oh, the answer is co-op ownership.” I look at the Mondragon Cooperatives and I say, “Oh, they’re managing these 80 businesses as a single healthy ecosystem.” They literally, just like a tree does underground, when business A has a good year and business B is struggling, transfer some of the profits from A to B.

John Fullerton 1:23:58
They manage them for the health of the whole, as opposed to optimizing the health of the parts. That’s holistic thinking as opposed to reductionist thinking. What we’ve done in the capitalist system is try to optimize the stock price of each individual part at the expense of all kinds of unintended consequences.

John Fullerton 1:24:19
If you can manage an ecosystem of 80 businesses for the health of the whole, there’s no reason why that concept can’t be expanded beyond the Mondragon Cooperatives. When I went to visit the Mondragon Cooperatives, they themselves acknowledged that this doesn’t need to be done as a co-op. The essence of it is that they are all working for the legacy of the Basque culture. There’s a higher end than short-term profits.

Dave Chapman 1:24:54
I was going to say it’s not a total shocker to me that this was started by a priest. I think that there’s an element of faith in it and a moral vision. I know that what you’re talking about isn’t just about being a good person. It’s about just being a sane creature that wants to survive and realizing that the whole system has to thrive for the parts to thrive.

John Fullerton 1:25:21
That’s actual science.

Dave Chapman 1:25:25
That’s the science. I named the three elements of a sustainable system that Donella Meadows talks about, and she said those were all from Herman Daly. But the fourth one was that the system must be equitable for the people involved. That was very significant because that’s how I have felt about the Real Organic Project from the beginning, and not everybody agrees with that.

Dave Chapman 1:25:49
I got a letter from somebody who supported us. He was one of the founders of an early organic distributor. It was when I wrote a letter on Black Lives Matter. I said in the letter, “I’m writing this as a person, not as the director, but you are my audience, so I’m going to share it with you because I have a lot of personal feelings here because I have a son who is a person of color, and I fear for his life in this world of ours. This is why I think it’s important to say that Black Lives Matter.”

Dave Chapman 1:26:26
I got a letter from this guy who said, “Stay in your lane.” We lost two farms, and about 50 readers all unsubscribed. This was something that was not universally believed by the people who did believe in organic agriculture, but they didn’t share, at least not, my vision, and I think the vision of our organization, that organic needs to be bigger than that.

John Fullerton 1:26:56
Let me try a different angle on the same question. This living systems frame, regenerative economy, if someone wanted to put it in the liberal versus conservative bucket, it would certainly drop in the liberal bucket. But I go out of my way to try to avoid that axis. In fact, I like to say my dream is that in our country, or in the world, the liberals and the conservatives are going to argue about how to create a regenerative economy in the future. That’s a win for me.

John Fullerton 1:27:37
I actually see values from both sides of the political spectrum. I have a set of personal opinions about human values, but I try to limit my work to the science of living systems. This is where the eight principles I talk about are important. One of them, this comes from a woman named Elisabet Sahtouris. She was an ecologist and living systems scientist. She uses the expression “empowered participation.”

John Fullerton 1:28:17
As an example, my feet are empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen in my body. If you look at any living system, in a sense the parts are empowered not just to get the food they need, but also empowered to participate, which means to contribute back. It’s a two-way exchange.

John Fullerton 1:28:40
If my feet are not empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen, I can’t walk. If I can’t walk, that limits some of the potential that I could manifest as a human being. It’s not a question of my ethics or my morals telling me to give my poor feet some oxygen. It’s actually undermining my potential as a whole if my feet can’t contribute.

John Fullerton 1:29:07
I would make the same argument about what we call the diversity issue in this country and around the world. If we limit participation, again, one can have very strong moral convictions about it. I happen to share yours, but that’s irrelevant to the point I’m trying to make.

John Fullerton 1:29:27
The point I’m trying to make is that if we go to a global level, we’re excluding the majority of people on this planet from participating in the health of society, as if their contribution means nothing to you and me. But it turns out that we’re all connected to that.

John Fullerton 1:29:55
Whether it’s because we’re going to have mass migration, which is going to be a problem for us, or whether it’s because someone in one of these “poor countries” is going to come up with some new creative idea that we’re all going to benefit from.

John Fullerton 1:30:10
You and I don’t know, but what I do know is the science is very clear: everything is connected. Regardless of my ethical beliefs, the health of human society is dependent on the empowered participation of all of its parts. That’s what I believe. That’s what the science says.

Dave Chapman 1:30:32
I actually think that you say that even better than Donella Meadows. I appreciate that you’ve thought this out very clearly.

John Fullerton 1:30:41
I think we fall into the trap of our moral stands on these issues, and then we’re trapped in the left right…

Dave Chapman 1:30:51
I agree. Again, the system as it exists is Mount Everest sitting on my shoulders. I become very short. I don’t know how we create that change without a call to people’s hearts and their beliefs. I just don’t think we’re going to logically figure it out.

John Fullerton 1:31:18
No, I agree with that.

Dave Chapman 1:31:19
It’s going to have to be a real appeal to somebody’s emotions and what’s important. What I’m afraid of is that it will be an appeal to something much darker. I do expect that all the countries of the world might become very fascistic in order to deal with the polycrisis that will be unbearable.

John Fullerton 1:31:49
No. There’s the base case path we’re on, and there’s the Hail Mary pass. I’m working on the Hail Mary pass, just to be clear. But I’ll share one interesting dimension on this. I was just at a meeting in Sweden. The theme was eco-civilization. Is that a concept that you’re familiar with?

Dave Chapman 1:32:19
I don’t know eco-civilization.

John Fullerton 1:32:21
Eco-civilization, you can sort of infer from the word what we’re talking about: a human civilization that is compatible with ecology, that is aligned with ecology. It has all the vibrations of what I’m talking about. But guess who’s enshrined it in their constitution as a goal? China.

John Fullerton 1:32:54
What’s interesting is that this – forget about regenerative, the word – “holistic” thinking, sort of balanced left brain, right brain, as opposed to left-brain-driven. Iain McGilchrist, in his book “The Master and His Emissary,” is brilliant on this. It’s much more Eastern than Western. Now I’m getting into another subject that I’m not really qualified to discuss, but the Eastern traditions, particularly Neo-Confucianism, which I have studied, but all of the Eastern traditions are much closer to this holistic understanding. Their languages are not linear. They’re symbolic.

John Fullerton 1:33:47
It turns out, and this became very apparent at this meeting in Sweden, that this need to toggle back to this balanced way of holistic thinking, not at the expense of reductionist methods. Use reductionist thinking when you’re designing your greenhouse or when you’re designing a rocket ship. But this balanced, broader intelligence that we’re all born with is much more innate. It’s much closer to the surface in Eastern cultures.

John Fullerton 1:34:22
Even though China is largely run by engineers right now, remember, in their culture, they think in 100-year and 1,000-year timespans. Yes, modernizing China is an engineering project, but their culture hasn’t lost touch with this more balanced, holistic view. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see what I would call a regenerative economy emerge out of Asia.

John Fullerton 1:34:54
To your point, there needs to be this sort of heart-based response. There’s a Singaporean businessman, a fourth-generation leader of a large family business, who is standing on stages giving speeches that say, “We have to begin with love.” He’s inspiring the business community to be heart-centered, love-led, as opposed to extractive, profit-led.

John Fullerton 1:35:46
But for him, this holistic thinking is natural. I don’t know how this is going to play out. I agree with you 100%. It’s not going to play out because someone reads John’s textbook and logically says, “Oh, this makes sense.” For me, I experienced 9/11. People who “get” this either were never identified with the extreme rational minds of finance and tech, or, more likely, they’re women than men.

John Fullerton 1:36:10
If you look at my class on regenerative economics, it’s probably 75% women. Feminine intuition is just inherently more of a right-brain quality. I think there are a couple of problems. One is we’ve got way too much power sitting in the hands of, I’ll call them, extremely logical, analytical-minded people: the Elon Musks of the world, the tech community. I used to be worried about the finance community, but actually the tech community is scarier now.

John Fullerton 1:32:19
We then associate that with success because our culture has defined success as money. But there are lots and lots of other people and other cultures where we’re not so out of balance. My hope is that as things continue to get worse – and they will – more and more people will wake up. That more people have experiences that say, “Something’s fundamentally wrong here.”

John Fullerton 1:32:19
The thing I’ve experienced about this living systems paradigm is when people see it, they’re like, “This just makes total sense.” There’s nothing radical about thinking that we ought to align our economy with the way life works. It seems like a self-evident truth to me. I’ve experienced more people approaching me now, questioning this. The worse things get, the more interested people get in what I’m talking about.

Dave Chapman 1:38:17
Yeah. You’ve said that innovation is less likely to come from the people who are enormously successful because that whole system is working pretty well for them. A lot of people are not enormously successful around the world right now, and that’s going to create an instability and a drive to change, which might get very messy, but it will be what it will be.

Dave Chapman 1:38:23
One of the things that is confusing to me in the work that I do, which is not really very different from the work that you do, honestly, is this: I find that we’re spending a lot of our energy on education, on conversation. On podcasts like this, we’re trying to put out dialogues with people who are thinking important thoughts and sharing that with people, and it changes how people think. Just as you got changed by reading Limits to Growth. Its logic did strike you, and it did change your life. I think that that is possible.

Dave Chapman 1:39:04
But I’m just curious. That’s what you’re doing too. You’re doing a lot of education. You wrote an excellent book. You have a course that actually I look forward to. Is that where you are going to double down? Do you go, “If we can hit some unknown tipping point in our group mind, then suddenly everything changes”?

John Fullerton 1:39:30
Again, it doesn’t mean it’s the right answer, but for me, it’s become very clear that education isn’t even the right word. What I’m experiencing is that there’s now, I think, 2,500 people that have been through my eight-week course. We don’t go out and target them. There’s an attraction. They find it through word of mouth or serendipity. It’s more of an awakening experience.

John Fullerton 1:40:03
I’m sharing with them a way to make sense of the chaos that they already know. They already have it. It’s just like the dots connect. It’s like a crystallization. I don’t convince people to give up the way they think, and say, “Oh, you’re right, John. That’s a smart idea. Now I’m going to think the way you do.” That doesn’t happen. What happens is they get attracted.

John Fullerton 1:40:27
Again, there’s a force happening. There’s change happening that is beyond our ability to explain it. Why would 2,500 people show up to an online course when they’re busy with no advertising other than LinkedIn posts? Because there’s a hunger for this. Then people come out of it, and they quit their day job, and they launch a new initiative.

John Fullerton 1:40:54
There’s a theory of change that’s underlying this, which is, I think, robust, which is partly Donella Meadows’ understanding. She was once asked, “How do you change a complex system?” I’m sure you’re familiar with her leverage points, places to intervene in a system.

John Fullerton 1:41:16
She goes through 10 things, and some would be intuitive, some not. But the punchline is, the most important leverage point is the paradigm within which the system exists. Another way of saying that is, it’s the theory that determines what you’re able to see.

John Fullerton 1:41:34
We live in a paradigm of extractive capitalism, a paradigm of separation. I’m separate from you. I’m separate from this thing we call nature. That’s all seemingly the water we’re swimming in. If I want to change policy, I can’t argue about my principles with… I tried with an Obama administration Treasury official. He threw me out of the room, basically, because he lives in the paradigm of the machine.

John Fullerton 1:42:07
It’s not about politics. It’s about seeing the economy as a living system, as opposed to a machine to be optimized. We need to shift that paradigm, and that’s more of an awakening experience than an educational experience. The second layer of our theory of change comes from another scientist, a guy called Ilya Prigogine. You’ve probably heard this expression.

John Fullerton 1:42:38
He’s one of the founders of chaos theory. He said, when a system is in a state of chaos – when a system is far from equilibrium, very unstable – which is very different than when the system is very stable and smooth, but when things are getting shaky, small islands of coherence can shift the entire system.

John Fullerton 1:43:07
You’ve built an island of coherence around the Real Organic Project. We’re building an island of coherence around this educational platform, building a community. There are thousands of other islands of coherence. They’re all invisible. You don’t see them on the evening news.

John Fullerton 1:43:33
You can supercool water below freezing in a container, and it doesn’t freeze until you tap the glass. I forget what that’s called. It’s true. The tap is the shift. We’re supercooling the potential for shift. I don’t know what the tap on the glass is going to be, but something tapped the glass, and the Berlin Wall fell down. That’s the project we’re involved in.

John Fullerton 1:44:03
It’s more like a metamorphosis than a change. I think metamorphosis is the right analogy. These imaginal cells are doing their work now, and we don’t know what the butterfly is going to look like, but I have a belief that, one way or the other, no matter what happens, no matter how difficult it gets, we’re going to come out of this recognizing that our economy needs to participate in and be a part of the living system that we’re all embedded in.

John Fullerton 1:44:41
I don’t know how you could not conclude that. I’m not pretending that it’s not going to get worse. I’m just arguing that we need to learn how to do this, and the sooner we learn, the sooner we’ll come out the other end of the chaos.

Dave Chapman 1:44:59
That’s great. We call them “islands of sanity” instead of islands of coherence, but it’s very similar because we see that we can create those islands of coherence, but I don’t know how to change the whole… We have to work where we can.

Dave Chapman 1:45:20
I want to ask you a question. This might be a difficult question. I interviewed Paul Hawken yesterday. We started talking about the word “regenerative.” Paul’s term was that it’s become a weasel word. Of course, this is from the guy who wrote the book Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.

Dave Chapman 1:45:46
What he meant was not that it is a weasel idea, but that the word has been, as so many words are, co-opted by corporate interests. They love the term “regenerative.” All of big food has moved and embraced the term regenerative. They actually use it as a weapon against organic. God knows, we have been fighting to prevent the co-option of the word “organic.”

Dave Chapman 1:46:22
Syngenta hates organic because there’s no way they can steal the word. They are the opposite. I’m just curious because I think that Paul would shudder if I said we have to fight for our words because he doesn’t like the model of fighting. He wants to think that we’re going to win this differently.

Dave Chapman 1:46:43
What do you think? Because I know what you mean by regenerative, or I have a pretty good idea, and I know it is not what Bayer or PepsiCo means by regenerative. But they have such a huge microphone, and we’re here with our very small microphones.

John Fullerton 1:46:58
Yeah. It’s a big problem. I guess I would say a couple of things on that. I’ll start with one fact. This learning platform we created is a partnership between myself and a company called nRhythm. We decided not to call it the Capital Institute platform because we didn’t want it identified with me or one organization, and we decided not to call it the regenerative learning community because we knew the word was going to be polluted and co-opted.

John Fullerton 1:46:58
We called it the With Life community: economics with life, finance with life, leadership with life, entrepreneurship with life. It’s hard to co-opt life. The fact is that regeneration is a scientific term that has scientific meaning. I can’t control how people use a word. I tend to talk more about aligning with how life works or aligning with living systems.

John Fullerton 1:46:58
It’s also why I tend to try to stay with the science as opposed to the political, ethical, or moral positions. I’ve had ecologists Janine Benyus and Sally Goerner, people who are scientists, review the eight principles I talk about. They’re not John’s principles. They’re one person’s best description of a complex process that is beyond reducing it to eight things, but so far they have effectively been, informally, peer-reviewed as rigorous science.

Dave Chapman 1:46:58
That’s the best I can do to preserve the integrity of the meaning. Beyond that, the big companies are going to do what they’re going to do, and we’ll probably have to stop using the word. You’ve been in that war longer than I have.

John Fullerton 1:47:21
I know. We decided not to go on to a new term. We certainly considered it.

John Fullerton 1:49:15
Yeah. You said Real Organic. Maybe we need the real regenerative.

Dave Chapman 1:46:58
That’s right. I’ve been calling for that for some years now. The problem with moving on to a new term is, if you succeed, they will take that too. These companies want to go where people’s hearts are, where their interest is. It’s not mean or evil. It’s just what they do. They go to where the money is.

Dave Chapman 1:49:47
They go to where people want to be, and they go, “Good. We want to be there too.” I felt like, “No, we’ve got to put a stake in the ground and say this means something. You can’t have it because you want it.”

John Fullerton 1:50:00
Although regenerative economy… There’s regenerative businesses, there’s regenerative products. That’s where that battleground plays out. No one can have their own economy. There’s a discipline of economics. My end game is actually to shift the discipline of economics so that what becomes the water we swim in, second nature that we don’t think about, is how do we build a company that’s organized and organized in alignment with how life works.

John Fullerton 1:50:47
Whatever product they make and what they call it… This is going to sound maybe strange, but I think there’s much more opportunity for, let’s call it, well-being, which is another term that has become popular. If companies, whatever they make, however they make it, managed themselves for the health of the whole organism, they would be more productive.

John Fullerton 1:51:16
No one wants to work for these big companies anymore. Just in old-fashioned productivity terms, the lost productivity of having employees that don’t believe in the business, are disengaged at work, don’t like their job, or have been forced into a cog in a machine…

John Fullerton 1:51:38
If businesses were smart and they created healthy organisms, more people would want to work there, and more good potential will come out of that, including innovations that are aligned with how life works, than if we hammer Nestlé to fix one product in their product line. For me, it’s not the work I’m interested in.

Dave Chapman 1:52:05
I I hear you, and I agree. There’s a reality that… I’ll pick King Grove Organic Farm down in Florida.

John Fullerton 1:52:18
Love their blueberries.

Dave Chapman 1:52:19
Fantastic, and it’s a fantastic farm, fantastic people, and you go there, and you go, “Oh, this is right. This is what I want to support.” You eat the food, and you go, “This is the food I want to eat.” Nonetheless, they have been quite successfully pushed off the shelves of Whole Foods Market because they are competing at that point with blueberries that come from Mexico and Peru, and instead of paying people $18 an hour to pick them, people are being paid $1 an hour to pick them.

Dave Chapman 1:52:54
It’s pretty hard to compete with that. Never mind the fact that often they’re not following the organic standards. Sometimes they’re following the standards that are wrong around hydroponics. Sometimes we’ve tested them, and it’s just sprayed with prohibited chemicals.

Dave Chapman 1:53:10
There’s all that stuff where it’s not part of the community, so you can’t see whether they’re lying or not, and nonetheless, they can put you out of business. That’s just a reality that all the 1,000 farms we represent deal with, which is that we still have to survive in that marketplace.

John Fullerton 1:53:31
I came to visit you with my microgreen company. We got put out of business by hydroponics, basically. There were other reasons, but that was the real killer. I get it. I’ve lost a lot of money learning that reality. There’s no answer. The transformation from – to use my metaphor – caterpillar to butterfly is not smooth, easy, and fun. It’s messy and hard, and there’s no two ways about it.

John Fullerton 1:53:57
This challenge of living in the system that exists… I’ve got three kids. It’s hardest for the next generation. They know what they want to do. They get all this, but the job market says if you want to make money, if you want to make a living, if you want a job, the jobs are over here. I don’t have enough jobs in the regenerative economy to point them toward.

Dave Chapman 1:54:34
It’s still in its infancy. There is cause for hope, but it’s still in its infancy. We see these many little models that are mostly thriving on the blood, sweat, and tears of the people involved. They carry the load themselves. They’re swapping their bodies for capital, often. I just interviewed a great farm in New York a couple of weeks ago. That’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s working.

Dave Chapman 1:55:11
I noticed in your example, except for Mondragon, they were all very small, and they were all very community-based. The Mondragon Corporation was a really precious example of something where I assume they’re marketing, probably internationally, their products. Do you think that a locally based economy is going to be where this happens?

John Fullerton 1:55:38
Yes and no. One of the principles that I talk about is an honest community and place. Compared to the current global economy, where we’ve optimized efficiency through global supply chains, yes, it will need to be much more decentralized. That’s already happening, interestingly. Here’s the crazy thing: that’s happening in response to Donald Trump more than anything else, as well as energy supply chains and wars in the Middle East.

John Fullerton 1:55:38
The move toward more resilient, more localized economies, you could argue, is happening for the wrong reason, but again, the theory that determines what everybody will see: the efficiency-driven globalization model was built on a lie. It became very fragile, and it’s now fractured, not because people got together and thought about it and read books and decided we should do this, but because there was a disturbance in the system called Donald Trump.

John Fullerton 1:55:38
Kamala Harris wasn’t going to do it, frankly. That would have been more of business as usual, so maybe the universe knows more than we do, and Trump is serving a purpose by waking us up to the fragility of this “globally efficient economy.” Now all of a sudden, you have economists talking about resiliency.

John Fullerton 1:55:38
It turns out that a balance between efficiency and resiliency is a first principle of living systems. They actually balance more toward resiliency than efficiency. The more the chaos in the environment, the more they’ll shift toward resiliency. The regenerative economy is actually growing in response to the Trump chaos.

John Fullerton 1:57:40
I like to talk about the internet as an example of regenerative economy infrastructure because one of the principles I talk about is robust circulation. That’s self-evident. A living organism has to have robust circulation, including healthy inputs, the food we eat, healthy outputs where our waste gets deposited, but also robust circulation inside the metabolism of the organism.

John Fullerton 1:58:03
This is not just about matter and energy, which is what the circular economy is about; We live in an information age, so it’s also about information. What does the internet do? It makes the circulation of information exponentially more feasible, which enables the empowered participation of billions of people in the project we call the global economy, the project called global culture that wasn’t possible before.

John Fullerton 1:58:40
But what have we done? We’ve allowed businesses like Facebook to have business models that are extractive, that use the internet, and they’ve essentially…. Think of the internet as a commons. We’ve allowed the Facebooks of the world to enclose the commons for their benefit, when in fact the internet should be a co-inherited wealth of all human beings, because no one invented the internet. It emerged out of all kinds of scientific advances.

John Fullerton 1:59:14
But we need to learn to manage it as a commons if we’re to all benefit from its potential as a commons. I don’t know how to do that. That’s a big project right there. But the point is that there are all these things emerging without some master plan that are aligned with the direction of a regenerative economy, from farmers’ markets to the internet to Mondragon to Donald Trump.

John Fullerton 1:59:40
Maybe it’s going to happen in a way, just like the Berlin Wall fell, slowly and then quickly, and no one saw it coming. That’s my belief.

Dave Chapman 1:59:49
I hope that you’re right. I had an interesting conversation with Seth Godin about the internet. He said, when it started, I really had such great hopes for it as a force for democracy in our culture, and instead it’s turned into a cesspool.

Dave Chapman 2:00:08
What you say is true, which is that it is an amazing place for the free exchange of ideas and information. It’s also a place for the free exchange of really scary thoughts that obviously could possibly destroy our children. It’s both, and we will see how we learn to handle it. We’re in new territory.

John Fullerton 2:00:35
With AI coming, it’s… We won’t go there today.

Dave Chapman 2:00:41
All right. John Fullerton, there’s so much we didn’t get to, but there’s so much we did. We’ll make probably two sessions out of this. Your book is called “Regenerative Economics: Revolutionary Thinking for a World in Crisis.” You just hold it up, just so that people get a sense. Beautiful. I’m in the middle of it. I highly recommend it. You’ve got a course also, which people can find, I’m sure, by just Googling you.

John Fullerton 2:01:07
Capital Institute is my organization

Dave Chapman 2:01:08
Capital Institute is the place to go. Thank you for spending this…

John Fullerton 2:01:15
Dave, thanks for coming down. It’s great to see you again.

Dave Chapman 2:01:18
It’s great.