I finally got through this whole conversation and i was in tears... in a time like now, this message of underlying unity, interdependence and oneness really landed. What a beautiful conversation and both your hearts are filled with gold. ❤
Nice to see two people I respect and largely align with in such a conversation. I have been arguing with John for 13 years about the underlying systemic issues we are actually facing, and the subtle yet important differences in our understandings and paradigms. Nate - it is far deeper than the prices. Yes, changing prices would change the specifics, but would not solve the core issues. John is right, that exponential growth on a finite planet is not possible. That is part of it, and it is deeply more complex than that too. The Greek root of economics is how we manage our household. If we are to survive, then our household needs to include all of biology, all of geochemistry, all of cosmology. And we need to treat them all as complex systems, under Snowden's Cynefin framework for the management of complexity. John is right, in terms of power, exponential growth works in the short term; but it is a growth curve that must collapse as ultimately the speed of light is a finite limit, as are mass and energy available on this planet, and in this solar system. John is right that we need to reform the economic system, and we do need to look deeply at the patterns that have sustained and threatened life on this planet, if we are to survive long term. John and I part company over the Gaia hypothesis, and there is something deep in those patterns, but it isn't that, and it is fundamental to our long term survival. Evolution is deeply more complex than competition. The evolution and survival of complexity is actually based in cooperation, and that gets rapidly deeply complex. But we humans like to simplify things, particularly if our short term advantage depends on it; and neoclassical economics is founded on the principle of competition, that competition can solve all problems, and that is demonstrably not the case. What does seem to be the case, is that competitive systems strongly optimise to the current context, which then makes systems fragile and without resilience when that context changes. We have a lot of issues, and they all impact on system design. Tendencies to power - mechanisms to mitigate (building inter dependencies) Resilience to perturbations Long term consequences Long term survival Local vs long term optima Economic vs ecological outcomes The existing economic system is complex in one sense in that the interdependencies that lead to systemic fragility have also been the main counters to the worst of our tendencies to power and global warfare, in that every army's supply chains are interlinked. And any general knows that wars are won on logistics; getting stuff where it needs to be when it needs to be there; with all the "fog" and uncertainties of battles. And politicians who are expansionist rely on their generals. Multiple levels of strategies play out in that set of dynamics. At 17:30 John says the idea of regenerative economics is 3 part: 1 The human economy is a living system. Nate we take 40% of net primary productivity. John made of people tools and technologies, and needs to continue. 2 Living systems science now shows patterns. John Neoclassical economics built on Newtonian thinking. 3 If the human economy is to survive, it needs to work within these 8 principles. I go along with John that a Newtonian view of reality is not compatible with our survival, things are demonstrably much more complex and fundamentally uncertain than that; but I disagree that science is based in Newtonian thinking. Certainly, for many it is, but not all. Some of us see science in probabilistic terms, as an eternal process of becoming less wrong, of improving our approximations so that they are more useful in more contexts. And often the old approximations remain fully useful in some sets of contexts. People who build houses all use the approximation that the earth is flat. At that scale, it works, within the margins of error in the measuring systems being used. If you want to get across the Pacific, and get somewhere near where you want to go, then you need a round Earth model, and Newtonian mechanics. To build a functioning GPS system you need a much more complex geode, quantum mechanics and general relativity. Are any of those ideas "Right" in any sort of ultimate sense? I doubt it. And all are useful approximations in some sets of contexts. The more we can treat all knowledge as "useful approximation", the more likely we are to notice when things don't quite work as expected (indicating a failure of some set of assumptions or approximations). If we are convinced that our "Truth" is correct, then we are not going to waste time looking for evidence that it is wrong, because, why would you - it is right! We tend to get justified and defend our "Truths" against any and all threats. That sort of hubris is dangerous at every level; and we all need our useful approximations in context, in order to get anything done with any degree of safety. In terms of reforming the economic system, it is much more like building a functioning GPS system than it is building a house. It requires of each of us both being able to accept and respect diversity, and being able to identify and mitigate cheating strategies, and being responsible, each to the highest level we are able, acknowledging fundamental uncertainties at boundaries, and some sets of unknowables. Human beings are demonstrably more complex than any human can deal with. Much of the wisdom that is part of being human is not conscious, it is embodied, it is deep within our complex structures, and it has been put there by the deep processes of biological and cultural evolution. We need that wisdom, and it is not enough. It has been sorted by the lessons of the past, the contexts of the past, and we are clearly entering new territory, that in some aspects (only some), have no historical precedent. We cannot ignore that wisdom from the past, and we must be able to build upon it, find its limits, and create new learnings, new wisdom, appropriate to the specifics of our contexts. We need our science, and our strategic thinking, as well; and they are not enough. We must understand that it is cooperation in diversity (real, uncomfortable, diversity) that holds the only real long term possibility of such security as is available in the face of the many uncertainties and threats that we demonstrably face. Freedom is a foundational part of life, a foundational part of being human, but that freedom has to stay within the bounds of the survivable, if we are to survive. That would be nice and simple if there were clear boundaries, but in many cases there are not. In the face of unknowns, in the face of known uncertainties, we must continue exploring, being creative, being responsible, if we are to find solutions to the many known issues that we know we have, but do not yet have adequate solutions for. Freedom without responsibility, will certainly encounter some of that vast set of vectors in the space of the possible that lead to destruction. There are far more of them, demonstrably, than survivable ones. It is so much easier to destroy than it is to build. Building is hard, and it is what we must do. We must build understanding. We must build trust networks. We must build our abilities to detect and mitigate cheating on cooperation (any and all levels). And trust is foundational to making anything complex work. So I like John, and I see some contexts in which the particular simplification that he is championing can be useful, and in the general case, we need something much more complex - deeply, deeply more complex.
I fully align with John's idea of the intrinsic indicators of health. In an economic sense, I would say that #1 would be everyone having sufficient money to meet their basic needs. #2 would be profit being secondary to safety and freedom, at every level, physical, ecological, social. I applaud much of what Elon Musk is doing. If we are to have a long term future, we must get a lot of serious technology off this planet, but our focus in the near term (next 30 years), needs to be on the moon, and building infrastructure there, and then building out infrastructure made from moon mass, into local and much wider orbits. About 41:20 John says "Things in nature are in balance", which is an over simplification. Nature is not in balance. Nature is eternally searching, and some lessons have been learned (one way or another), and so some things are encoded in systems. Complexity requires constraints in order to exist. That can look like balance, and it is actually something dynamic. Around 41:55 John asks "How do we restore the balance between power and constraint?" Is that really a balance, or is it something else entirely? Isn't it really the case that long term survival demands constraints on power - all levels, all domains, but the nature of those constraints can be very context sensitive. Over simplifying the deep complexity present leads to huge potential for the abuse of power, which puts our existence as a species at risk. The dynamics present are much more complex than power and constraint, and involve the idea of search (in the sense of creativity) and the idea that cooperation and trust are fundamental to the survival of higher order complexity. And that demands a willingness to identify and mitigate cheating strategies on the cooperative - all levels, all domains. This is, actually, deeply, irreducibly, complex; and there really cannot be any useful simplifications without first acknowledging the complexity actually present, and being conscious of the uncertainties it imposes on any simplifications we may choose to employ. I like John. I like what he is doing. Some of his simplifications are useful in some sets of contexts. But the issues we need to face are actually deeply more complex than this. I agree with him that we need to align with how life works, but that is a deeply complex subject. At higher levels, that means, necessarily, cooperation in diversity, and that will be uncomfortable for many, and it will demand responsibility at levels too few have yet given serious consideration to, in terms of cheat detection and mitigation; in terms of maximising freedom; in terms of reducing risk to a reasonable minimum; and those two things involve massive areas of uncertainty at the margins, where currently most people seem to prefer the simple certainty of "Truth" (even though it is demonstrably in error), rather than accepting human fallibility and responsibility. Around 49:32 Nate says "And then we founded agriculture and it started hierarchy and then surplus and then fossil fuels and then fractional reserve banking and then AI and then finance. Like finance played a role in accelerating the maximum power principle." Kind of. That is one way of viewing history. I argue it is far from the most powerful. If you look at life as "search", then we explore things, we try things, and we keep what seems to work. Prior to us, life did that by modifying combinations of genes, and by a little bit of mutation. We can do it with ideas, technologies, ways of thinking, ways of being. Evolution has biased us to look for simple things that work, and mostly that works, but sometimes it makes us over simplify things. We didn't evolve in a world of computers and libraries and videos and aircraft and refigerators and electricity etc. All these things are new to us, and we are using them with brains evolved to work with fire and caves. We are capable of getting past this, but only by accepting some deep realities related to complexity and evolution. The need for cooperation and trust. The need to search for those who cheat on the cooperative, and stop them cheating (preferably by returning them to cooperation, by various sets of incentives). This ability of ours, to model complex systems, and to make long term plans, could allow us to mitigate the risks that have threatened life on this planet many times before (shown clearly in the fossil record), or we could over simplify it, and self destruct as a result. John introduces the term - chrematistic - defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "pertaining to, or engaged in the acquisition of wealth". Around 54:20 Nate said that the ultimate goal is to amass power; but to me that is wrong. It is an over simplification of something more complex. We are the product of those things that have survived, over all the many contexts where most things did not survive. That gives us many level of tendency to that which survives. In this sense, it is survival, not power, that is the ultimate goal. Power is often a useful proxy for survival, and not always. Too much power is dangerous, as most of mythology clearly tells us. There is a sweet spot, and we, as a species, are well past it in terms of our ability to wage war. We are much more than a "species out of context". In a very real sense, we are an entirely new class of life. A form of life capable of searching the space of systems of complexity far faster (many orders of magnitude faster) than any form of life before us on this planet. Yet we tend to over simplify. We tend to ignore the depths of complexity present in living systems, because looking at it, modeling it to some reasonable approximation, is hard. So we simplify to - evolution is competition - whereas a much more accurate simplification would be, complexity demands cooperation and responsibility to survive. But being able to see that clearly for oneself requires understanding probability, and spending many years studying the systems of life. And not many do either. Yes our systems of finance were an amazing invention, and they are complex, but their systemic basis is too simple to survive. We must inject cooperation, responsibility, and cheat detection and mitigation into the core of the systems, or the incentive structures of those systems will destroy us, because they are too simplistic, too competitive. We must see that freedom is a fundamental aspect of life, foundational to the definition I find most useful; and also see that freedom without appropriate levels of responsibility is always and necessarily destructive. Too little freedom we perish, too much freedom we perish (just like too little water we die of thirst, too much and we drown). There is a sweet spot, very context sensitive. Buddhism uses a metaphor of a stringed instrument tuned just so, neither too high nor too low. The Greeks had the virtue of the mean, between the vices of excess and deficiency. Reality (including us) seems to be sufficiently complex and fundamentally uncertain that the tuning point for each of us will be slightly different, in different contexts. That is part of the strength and power of cooperation in diversity. Around 55:30 both Nate and John note that the over simplification of economic outcomes doesn't distinguish between cheating and real production, it just deals in money. Around 57:30 John accurately characterises the dangers of over specialisation and isolation into silos. We need more generalists. I chose to be a generalist 60 years ago, and have been working at it ever since. John does not mention the fundamental problem with markets, that they value abundance at zero. That needs much more attention. Yes there are problems with a sole focus on efficiency, that increases risk.
John makes mention of cancer being regenerative. This to me is an indication of the failure, the over simplification, of the paradigm. A human being is a vast cooperative colony of cells. Cancer occurs when for some reason, cells stop communicating cooperatively with neighbours, and start using resources for replication without regard to messages from the whole. We need our individual freedom, and we need to be conscious of our part in society. Both are necessary. Selfish growth, without regard to the impact on the whole, is the definition of cancer. It is, to a good first order approximation, a description of the finance system. About 1:15:00 John starts to describe what to do. I generally align with that. And in starting with self, we need to work at many levels of self. Start with giving our cells what they need, adequate nutrients, adequate oxygen, adequate exercise. Next we need to work at the many levels of our consciousness. Acknowledging and managing our emotions. Gaining skills. Being a contributing member of our various communities. Being a responsible member of the ecosystem.
About 1:21:10, John nails it, and Nate accurately characterises the major risk. Things need to get bad enough to incentivise change, but not so bad that people go into survival mode and hoard. That is a narrow window, and it seems to be our only real option. I do not like John saying that the problem is reductionism. It isn't. The big issue is over simplifying, and stopping looking too soon, and being too confident about the simple ideas we have. Life is complex - deeply, deeply complex. We want simple, but reality isn't simple. We must accept that. We must accept eternal uncertainty. We must accept the need for cooperation and responsibility, if we are to have any amount of freedom for any significant time. I strongly align with both John and Nate, on caring that life continues. The myth of separation is an instance of over simplification. Regeneration is good, but the core issues are far deeper, and we need to go to those depths to get a system that has a reasonable probability of surviving long term.
As a layperson, I understand what living wholesomely means. Thank you both for the deep truth about the reality we've not seen yet, and thank you for not giving up on humanity.
So many useful insights and frameworks - thank you Nate and John for your work. Money has become the means and the end goal rather than just being the means to exchange energy invested.
I see people like John Fullerton similar to the old biblical prophets guiding humanity in the right direction of the future. I wish more people could receive, listen and understand messages like this. Nate has many other guests that fall into this modern day prophet category. Somehow they've been enlightened with a gift that give us hope and agency in the future.
Looking forward to joining the course John Fullerton teaches on Zoom. You learn what you know. I've known his particular "experiential theme" through experience...and now may learn about what I know! Thanks, Nate.
Nate asks about people realizing their work doesn't align with their values. I suspect most people realize that after about a decade in the work force. The issue is in a society where people live paycheck to paycheck they are trapped. Few people have the luxury of being able to walk away from a job like both Nate and his guest did. Most would be in bankruptcy without their next pay check.
The reality of which you speak seems likely to be increasingly important. The trends toward wage slavery and hopelessness, all kinds of addiction and misery, kooky theories and religiosity can be tied to (and fear of) likely decreases in standards of living. That most people of all nations must undergo this transformation before succumbing to collapse will be fascinating if not tragic. Rats in a cage.
We have debt issued by banks that we class as money and if we spend it as energy we have ruined the planet. Bankruptcy for everybody and living pay check to pay check could in fact be better, at least poverty, as all money is debt means less loans being entered into and if govt chooses to put that debt into sustainable it would be better, but it will always be low impact so low consumption, if we cut out most over consumption almost all those businesses would fall over. Food medical and shelter is all we need, the easiest thing to achieve, for all, it's not like we can't if we were allowed to choose.
debt issued by banks that we class as money and if we spend it as energy we have ruined the planet. Bankruptcy for everybody and living pay check to pay check could in fact be better, at least poverty, as all money is debt means less loans being entered into and if govt chooses to put that debt into sustainable it would be better, but it will always be low impact so low consumption, if we cut out most over consumption almost all those businesses would fall over. Food medical and shelter is all we need, the easiest thing to achieve, for all, it's not like we can't if we were allowed to choose
The countercurrent of renewal, awakened life/awareness, connection to all living things and the power of the Universe, is amplified by this conversation and flows with an expanding and mighty force in response to recent developments...
Ah - thanks very much, Nate, for the introduction to John and Regenerative Economics. This is the most nuanced, systems-oriented and naturally-wholistic version of economics I've come across - compared with Doughnut, Ecological, Environmental, No Growth and Degrowth. Having life-dynamics as the core principle is both brilliant and, when pointed out, obvious.
I stepped away from a life insurance/financial planning company when it just seemed that the mission was to take insurance premiums and shuffle them around to the rest of the company. Worked with great people, but thankfully I was "called" into community work. I'd only add to John's advice, to follow the rule in the book "What color is your parachute?": Always be looking for your next job...and in the context of John's lesson, add the clause "the next job...that fits your conscience."
If money is a ticket to the energy we can't use does this make any difference overall. For efficiency to happen it can be energy saved and I worry how your sentence applies to a halving of emissions in the next five years if they get a new job while the same overall consequences happen to the planet. I might work for save the children but not much point if I still go skiing each year.
Really enjoyed this insightful conversation between Nate and John, as I have enjoyed so many episodes of this podcast. Made me reflect on values, identity, the double bind and on walking away. I time my awakening to the superorganism to my early twenties some 25 years ago (back then called rat race), at a time when I was finishing my university studies and doing my master's thesis for a tech company. My basic recognition back then as a young man was that if we'd develop those mobile services we were developing at half the pace instead of working long hours for those goals, we'd probably all be much happier in the end and some more nature could have been preserved. Since then it has been a continuous struggle for finding a balance between values and work, taking detours every now and then in trying to find something more meaningful and then coming back to needing to earn a living and establish a decent place in the social system as it is. I agree with other commentators here that for most of us it's maybe not that easy to just walk away like Nate and John did and successfully create something meaningful outside the superorganism. So sometimes or even most of the time I feel like either a little stupid or failed for not being able to walk my values as much as I would certainly like to. Rationally I can undestand it depending on at least your financial capital, your social capital and social context, skill set, timing, and even sheer luck. So I suspect walking away from the rat race is actually pretty much like running a startup company - every now and then some of them succeed, most don't, however. It's good that some succeed and let's be grateful for them and support them. At any rate it has been a learning journey (although I'm every now and then losing a bit sight on what all that learning will finally be good for). Some 10+ years ago I walked away from my tech job in search for something more aligned with my values. I became entrepreneur with no real good business plan, spent some time in an initiative for ethical banking, and after personal finances started running short ended up mostly running a small business of a family member. Did that for a bit too long until I was ripe for getting a real job again, more in the field of my education. I had become more humble to understand that I'd probably enjoy that more and that I would also earn more that way. A bit later I also worked for the public sector, kind of enjoyed that, even if it wasn't so well paid. Finally it started to bother me that yes we were addressing many topics in social sustainability there but that whole system was still extractive in terms of environmental sustainability (mostly maximizing energy and material use for social well-being of the masses under whatever budget constraints were given). I recently switched to a listed company to work with sustainability data and reporting and continuous improvement. That's closest to my values so far and I'm glad there is an increasing number of job opportunities in this area. Doesn't entirely remove the nagging feeling that this maybe not enough in the big picture. Will not necessarily address the rebound effect Nate discussed with Daniel Smachtenberger. Will not be the kind of holistic bioregionalism espoused by Daniel Christian Wahl, yet unlike him I believe this putting it into data and numbers is definitely a step in the right direction. I must say I'm not sure if I understand what Nate's guests mean by holism and if they all mean the same thing by it. Would be interesting to hear how they see it different from say systems dynamics, which is still a pretty rational and reductionistic pursuit, after all. Doing systems dymamics, you would sit at a computer drawing causal-loop diagrams and doing simulations, which is still pretty far from the experience of diving with dolphins (or whatever it was Daniel Christian Wahl told he was doing that inspired him to study holism). Anyway I do see pretty much meaning in getting all that sustainability and lifecycle assessment data right on your supply chain and on your products - the ultimate vision being, I guess, as a consumer, in addition to the monetary price you would see a declaration of the impacts the production of this thing you are buying has had on the environment or on the social systems. The big question of course being: would we care even if we had that information? Would we still prioritize the experience of a new car and justify the impacts as a necessary tradeoff for the dopamine we get? Anyway, in the meanwhile, while waiting on the consumer side, companies are already today having the market incentive to optimize down the impacts in their supply chain. Unless some holist makes a yet much clearer point for the contrary, to me it seems just getting it all reliably down to numbers using well-defined methodologies and basing decisions on those numbers would get us pretty far. Maybe a bit reductionistic, and would not be rocket science, would just need the right incentives. On the incentive side I'm seeing regulation as a driving force at least here in Europe (like CSRD, European product passport and the like). Congratulations for and good luck with the new president on the other side of the Atlantic :) I'm also a believer in transparency and in science-based or evidence-based approaches. Not saying I wouldn't see some systemic challenges in how academia are set up these days (as I believe Nate touched on with Daniel Schmachtenberger at some point; and I believe some research type of work would have suited me well but never found myself so much at home in the academia), but still. On that ethical banking initiative I mentioned, a major problem in my view was that some of the key people there were associated with the anthroposophical movement. In addition to that we didn't have enough skill in the team, it seemed that what was considered ethical and fundable would be fundamentally deemed by a group of elders sharing an obscure and opaque ideology. Now with all the sustainability metrics laid out in global standards and protocols and recommendations to follow, maybe we can get somewhere without need to resort to holism in the form of an ideology. Just if the will to proceed was there. A bit too many voters the world over don't seem so motivated, though, unfortunately. Still a bit on values and identity. Tough questions. I recognize it's difficult letting go of comparing myself with peers in the same social contexts, like family members or people I studied with or work with. Going for more alignment with values and further from feeding the superorganism would mean going with a pretty much lower income level and letting go of many of the comforts in my life. So even if I abstractly think that this would be good to strive for, I have started to curiously look more at my real values, those that I really enact through my actions. For instance, one of my real values is being able to provide a good life for my kids, meaning a certain material standard of living I'm used to and also see my peers having. Actually I believe there was a piece of research showing a pretty strong correlation between income level and CO2 emissions (acting probably also as a proxy for energy use and extractive exploitation at the same time I believe). So yeah, I guess my point is that I run into these big unresolved contradictions when I observe my values. Like I want to give my kids a good life, buy them stuff their peers would also have, while at the same time, knowing producing this stuff is pulling the rug out from under the future generations. Would be curious if anyone else of you who live paycheck to paycheck would have some insights to share on how you have resolved some of these values and identity dilemmas!
Thanks Nate, John's Ideas for changing the perspective sounds interesting as well as necessary for future economics. Although we all know that change is easier to talk about than it is to implement...
I was wondering if what John was referring to "We need to become Chemastasis" as Alchemist, Greek spelling 300 C.E. Khemeioa-changing or transmutation base metals to a higher value. In his case a higher currency...
@@steveo5295 John Fullerton was talking about "chrematistic" which refers to the management or negotiation of money matters. It is a notion founded by Aristotle to describe the practice of accumulating means of acquisition in general, and more specifically by those who accumulate money for its own sake and not for any purpose other than personal pleasure....
I understand the practice of accumulating money for no other purpose than that of accumulation, it becomes a numbers game or hoarding of wealth. Change on the other hand, requires a partnership with like minded people, this requires relationships and nobody jumps into a relationship without taking risks. This is why the hoarder hangs on to their wealth. The only way a hoarder will change is an breakdown in the system or they become comfortable with small groups of like minded people with the same risks...
@@steveo5295 Change does not require a partnership and people need to stop saying wait until they get support imo. Change can happen with you, then it affects another and so on, waiting for like minded people is waiting for the first person to affect change and that influence to spread out.
we can do it, not in my lifetime but i wanna be part of the beginning. just love, no taboos, I hope this lemma will help a lot, if we can all start to follow it. thanks guys, i love you
Great program Nate, John Fullerton is a wealth of information on Regenerative futures. Going through his extensive reading list is going to take a while...🙂
Nate - Hope you consider having Louis Arnoux on your podcast (he was on Rachel Donald’s Planet Critical not long ago with a SUPER important perspective re energy and economics and thermodynamics), either as a 1:1 conversation or a roundtable with any of John Fullerton, Daniel Schmachtenberger, etc etc. Bravo on this excellent episode with John Fullerton!
I was gifted a book years ago called Beyond Rangeland Conflict written by a Sierra Club employee who once thought that cattle were hooved locusts devouring the west. He interviewed a number of ranchers, visited and walked their ranges, and realized that regenerative ranching was not only possible, it could make a better living by practitioners who worked with nature's tools rather than against them. I included Holistic Management in my classes for the remainder of my career, but failed to connect it to economic thinking well. You and John Fullerton just did that well. This is an episode (as many are) that I will listen to, and act on, more than once. Thanks.
Thank you, Nate, very interesting. After years of asking myself, how paradise handles the ethical question about money, I come to the conclusion, that, to simplify our financial system all we have to do is abolish the interest worldwide. This would change our relationship with money on a fundament le level. We remove the power of self replication and make money just another tool. It would make no sense to accumulate a lot of tools if one doesn't use them. We would develop a friendship with money and use it more wisely. How many times we humans think about money on a daily basis is shocking and tells me we created a monster controlling several aspects of our lives. In the far future, man is going to be the master and remove money from their thoughts all together. Stay sane all.
Brill Nate, so we go off a wander to Plotkin's tune in Nature, come back and consider this gentlemans wiles when back. Need a part two to this. Something switched with election, a new energy has kicked in. How to take this man's ideas to the personal. The invest needs to be to person, to idea, growth by osmosis. Great Nate, keep shining, your in a flow........ choose everything by intuition, we all bounce off each other. You're becoming a good ant to antenna with. Heard you saying/slipping Prosocial. What about David Sloan Wilson. Cheers, rock, shine. Be seeing you.
1989 PBS series with Bill Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myths transformed my understanding of life. Watched it many times over the years particularly in hard times. Will be binge watching through the current darkness. Particularly powerful story of being one with nature before being thrown out of the garden of eden into the world of pairs of opposites hit home. Life came out of the earth, it was not injected from some heavenly deity onto the earth. Alan Watts had a beautiful story inline with Campbell's. Suppose aliens billions of years ago on a spaceship flew by earth. They looked at it and said its just a bunch of rocks. Much later they can by again and said look its peopling! Thats what some planets do.... Rambling note here as we're headed into a time of darkness.... Thanks for your work!
Trump has just won, and now I'm listening to two men discussing the deep insights into our current predicament... What an extraordinary interesting time to be alive and conscious.
Profound and salient thinking and prognostication. Challenging the status quo in such manner is the way out of this environmental predicament. The question is, can we move this juggernaut sufficiently before it's too late. Right now, converts are far too few, despite the apparent shift. Something Bill Rees argues; certainly acknowledge any and all efforts of effective change, while realizing the current scale of change simply pales compared to what's needed to turn the ship. Whether billionaires can exist without disruption depends completely on the financial status of everyone else. Failing to maintain a reasonable degree of equanimity seems to lead inevitably to community and societal breakdown.
Nate, would you consider having a round table discussion on the role authoritarianism has/will have on the Great Simplification? It seems that authoritarianism can not only aggravate, take advantage and hasten the arrival of it, but on impact forced to be the default fallback position.
Great idea, very needed. Especially if say looking at the tealeaves we see a storm of swords coming, with trade wars as supply chains "simplify" Default into popularist border closing nationalism, while the issues are bigger than any borders. But just like there's alot of Climate Chaos locked in that we can't dial back -even we stopped all our $hit Now. it's an "adaptation" issue. Adapting to a period of knee jerk bouncing between authoritarianism & anarchy. But there's an opportunity to adapt both towards better, while to adapting to both, while also pre-building deeper aligned foundations to pick up the pieces when the shouting calms down n the gieger counter returns to normal😮
Nate! Can you make all your episodes and linked content available for download before its no longer possible. Your work and information is important. Love your work and you are a inspiration for me, you may not like it but your words carry deep meaning
The audio for all of our episodes can be downloaded via the audio player on each episode's page on our website! Here is the page for this episode: www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/149-john-fullerton
Thank you Nate, great episode. Not sure I see the economy itself as a living system, other than metaphorically, but it certainly results from relationships between biological entities in a social system and it seems to make sense to, therefore, apply the same principles.
Globalization is not about efficiency. It is about empire. Every empire has sought global rule. The modern globalism is no different. It is not free market but top down control.
Nate I think it would be cool if you ask guests to bring you one word that people most likely have never heard of and teach us one new word each episode. I think it would be cool for everyone to grow their vocabulary. This episode with “Chrematistics” could be a good starting place for that idea.
I've seen a few of the miracles in the middle that nature, regenerative agriculture manifest, when you stop feeding plants hydrocarbon fertiliser the insects no longer sense that the plant is an anomaly that needs to be taken out of the gene pool. I've personally witnessed this on my farm. I follow the practises John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture shares.Allan Savory videos show creek flowing all year round in dry environments and regenerating grasslands in drought conditions. I think we humans are here to be the themostat for the biosphere over eons.
I think one of the simplest direct means by which economy could be made to fit within physical constraints, Is to have local economies fit themselves within their own physical constraints. That would largely mean being able to feed clothes, water, shelter their population from resources available within their city limits, or slightly more generously, a county. When faced with the Engineering challenge of accomplishing that then I consider that to be in an engineering/ecological challenge And you run that experiment in every community across the nation, We have the opportunity of finding some answers which I will say, will be tailored to a specific circumstance. Just like life, which relies on variety and creativity In order to meet the challenges of a ever changing world, We’ve got to end the monoculture of The modern economy which forces everything it touches into a singular pattern of operation. For all our imagines diversity and variety and products the fundamental strategy of modern civilization is incredibly narrow
The word mentioned by Mr John Fullerton is the word Chrematistics. The original Greek word is “χρηματιστική” (chrematistiké). It comes from “χρῆμα” (chrēma), which means “money” or “thing of value.” In ancient Greek thought, particularly by Aristotle, “chrematistics” was often associated with the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, -making money out of money-, distinct from “οἰκονομία” (oikonomia), which focused on managing resources to support a household or community sustainably.
Χρήμος = Money (note: eta not epsilon), στάσις = Stability. However, Aristotle's word may have been χρηματιστική (Chrematistics) that just means the study of wealth.
Dear Nate, Regenerative ag ✅ Regenerative economics ✅ Regenerative development [__] (Please reach out to Carol Sanford or Pamela Mang to round out your explorations of the 'regenerative paradigm'.. you have saved the best for last!)
Unfortunately, what happened yesterday is not in the equation yet for this discussion. So imo if you put the election results in all the formulas and equations it equals a brick wall 🧱😢 we can't afford a 4 year setback. I have never wished so hard to be wrong.
The impassable problem at present, with wealth comes responsibility, as does power. Not an accepted parameter, and talking pain, what is that, reality says death through the tropics and countries immersed in poverty, just like the deaths of 15,000 children in Palestine, the extinction of 600,000 years of life learning productivity families.............first world responsibility, unowed, denied. Nevertheless, a good conversation echoed inside me deeply. Thanks, blokes, well done.
44:50 Nate asks: How do we get there without a miracle? Do we just move in that direction? Answer: Devise solutions that have short-term, mid-term and long-term benefits. This in itself is a paradigm shift. Example: home gardens scaled up to market gardening. Example: measure energy inputs and outputs and work with smaller inputs and smaller outputs rather than large inputs and large outputs. Regenerative grazing has large inputs and if you don't get large outputs it doesn't work. Growing cover crops have small inputs and small outputs in the short-term, but large outputs over the mid- and long-term.
Amen to this last comment! What is one thing you would do to improve planetary and human futures? John Fullerton: "I truly believe if we could see our role, … I think the myth of separation is at the base of this. and the myth of separation allows us to believe in neoclassical economics. And neoclassical economics and the finance algorithm that it spawned is very much the root cause of the polycrisis."
Well, you are on a roll, Nate. Or maybe just pulling up the rope you've been dangling on. Or maybe your singing in the forest is attracting others of your ilk. Anyway, great guest. Thanks for the link to repurposing the surplus...
I tend to diverge from this opening statement. The efficiency in question is capitalism talent to devote human ingenuity to make ever more efficient the depletion and pillage of resources, agricultural, mineral, etc from one part of the world deliver them to the financial and industrial core. Human ingenuity is being devoted to destructive processes, not to constructive ones such as improving the productivity of small scale multi crop farms. Or the improvement of technologies to build from local materials using passive construction techniques. Or improving techniques to add sponge elements to towns and cities while making them walkable. All of these measures shift a communities economy away from the hydrocarbon pathway, and largely minimize the energy intensity those communities engage in. Modern society is very backwards. It’s not capable of surviving for any extended period of time on the set piece of territory in contrast to the natural world which has solved this problem for billions of years.
Re: the discussion in the last few minutes of this video: There is no force more in favour of “separation” than religions, in particular Judaism, and more specifically the kind of Judaism espoused by supporters of Israel. And this of course is the third rail. So I see no solution. I remind people that Milton Friedman studied to be a rabbi before turning his education to Economics. His inspiration, Hayek has been called by his peers, “a Jew in spirit”. To me, the mantra of profit maximization flows from Judaic teachings more so than other Abrahamic religions, who would seek “reasonable profits”, not the superlative. For any hope for a future for humanity, we would have to change the ethos of capitalism from “profit maximization” to one of an expectation of “reasonable profits”. Alone that concept, that people are NOT entitled to maximize their profits (because capitalism IS zero -sum, terrible for the “losers”), could change society. It is also odd that people think of America as a Christian nation, despite its touting of “American Exceptionalism “, and quest for global hegemony. This is not at all what Jesus, a humble carpenter, taught. He overturned the financiers’ money tables, and promoted values other than wealth creation.
I have been around for quite a while and see things that I know to be unsustainable or folly. Eventually reality asserts itself. The hope is that we can prevent too much damage before reality takes over.
Friends, I fully understand the perspective of the carbon pulse and risk to resources and the potential “snap” back that could cause tragedy for our lifestyles. storage capacity will be needed to store renewable energy during non-windy times or simply at night when there is significant volatility to renewables; or I suppose we should get used to a natural energy cycle with intermittent access. My question is that I’ve never heard Nate, Daniel or any guests talk about nuclear energy. Is this because of risks to war, a situation where we end up with a “nuclear pulse” way down the road, or something else entirely?? Genuine question, a genuine response would be welcomed
Nuclear pulse, great reframing 👍 At least 2 things spring to mind peak uranium vs thorium vs peak diesel window for mining & supply chaining minerals / resources. The greens feel more than they think, so fearing nuclear empowering weapons... Got coopted by big oil into fearmongering nuclear power n risks. Not making the hard decisions of the would you rather civilisational drinking. game. All Tec is just a step for consciousness to use for it's fuller expression. Nuclear I feel is a great stepping stone, but green button not red.
It has been covered by default as well with other topics like all the products we get out of oil, we wouldn't get from nuclear. The UK for instance, 15.68% of total energy is just electricity and still a lot of that generation is gas. At the moment renewables are around 2% of total energy, it would mean a 3500% increase in plants and that's just for electricity, not the embedded energy in products that can't have a replacement because there is no replacement for oil, a product we didn't create.
Wonderful discussion, thank you. Postcapitalism now! We're establishing a free 24-hour eco hub fab-lab café third place regenerative cosmolocal community node... here on Kalapuya Land, Eugene Oregon USA. Would love to network and collaborate. 🌱
"How do we restore the balance between power and restraint" he asks... I suggest we have an economic system that mimics the asymmetry of power we see in nature (the fox and the hare analogy) whereby the essence of competition within the economic system dictates that the richest can only be a certain degree more rich than the poor.
I wonder if permaculture can help understand this. In this we plan only the big structures that might limit where we grow. Then we build guilds, each is complete in themselves when finished but small built one at a time. Throughout we mimic nature, and each system is unique and a certain amount of trial and error, hope and miracle is involved as well. So in culture and business we need those big structures though exactly what those are you guys will probably have to figure that out. Those guides is my farm and others dreams each one when complete will highly fruitful but through trail and error and hope and miracle. Its this second part that in motion everywhere throughout the world, perhaps these might lead to those structures.
Replacing wildlife with cattle on grasslands to "mimic" their ecological role is, in my view, far from a holistic approach. This is the essence of what I see as a "Savory swindle." While it might provide some benefits in areas devoid of native grazers, it ultimately supports wildlife displacement rather than their restoration. This approach doesn’t work universally on all grasslands-such as dry grasslands, areas west of the Rockies where bison were absent, or lands where forests were cleared to create pasture. Rotational grazing often requires significant fencing infrastructure, creating smaller, controlled paddocks for cattle movement. I find the language used here misleading. I would much rather see efforts focused on repopulating grasslands with wildlife for several reasons. Livestock management generally aims to control disease (like brucellosis or bovine tuberculosis, diseases introduced to native wildlife from European cattle), manage predation, and reduce competition for forage. Additionally, livestock grazing can alter plant communities, often resulting in the loss of indigenous food and medicinal plants, the trophic downgrading of planet earth, and methane emissions. It’s clear that livestock management tends to favor homogenous landscapes, yet we need diverse habitats to support a thriving biodiversity. Despite this, terms like "regenerative," "holistic," or "rotational grazing" are commonly used to describe these practices. That said, I appreciate the analogy to the economy-it’s a brilliant way to illustrate regenerative economics, sparking new ways of thinking for the audience. Well done!
Living on the edge of the great sagebrush desert, cattle and grasslands are a horrible combination. One cow can decimate diversity over a vast area. Some plants will just not survive their appetites. A small herd will destroy stream banks. Last month I took a trip into the hills. This is border lands between forest and sagebrush. I took a walk along a dry creek bed with established pines. These pines were 16" up to 20" in diameter, which is very rare considering the heavy lumber cutting and the multiple fires. The ground between trees looked mowed. No bush, no grass, just tree trunks and multiple piles of cow pies. The end of the hike I came to a sign the advertised "This area under habitat restoration." Lip stick on a pig.
My bubble is not as rosy as Nates. Too many locals would gladly string up tree huggers. America a round here is going to get real great real fast. Almost everyone is cheering the election results. I keep thinking Industrial civilization has got to go, and Donald Trump is just the man to do it.
I think asking what the “definition” of a living system is misleading, as there are so very many kinds one might try to squeeze into the term. From general systems view, all observable “systems” are recognized from their cohesion, their property of holding together that is what the term “system” evolved from in the earliest oral traditions that survived. Holding together is also a physical property of adaptivity, and if you ask how that developed, the origin is always growth, a sign of animated life. However, .. There’s a danger in misusing terms to the limit. So I refer ‘life’ and ‘living’ only in context to carefully avoid solipsism.
‘Someone’ is ‘pessimistic’? “So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference be tween them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario. Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.”? lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports
Hey Nate, i really appreciate the discussions you are hosting. I would highly recommend hosting Joel Salatin if you can. I think he will have some practical insights into how individuals, families and communities can work together to shift into regenerative economic enterprises and focus more on Generous Domestic Practice vs Gross Domestic Product. I think he’ll also have insights into what many of your guests bring up from time to time - that our human flourishing on this ecological spaceship Earth is dependent upon a core moral ethic. As such, I would suggest reaching out to folks whose understanding of their faith leads them in that practice of moral ecological stewardship. Unfortunately, not everyone who claims a particular faith is understanding and practicing what that faith actually teaches. Ghandi famously observed this when he was looking for a moral basis for a just Indian society before Indian independence.
More than anything now, we must have a change of our point of view from separateness to a holistic view of the country and the world. I believe that We can still fix this Climate Crisis . I am more than anything an agriculturalist. We are going to have to adopt a regenerative paradigm. We can do this. Now is the time to unite. I hope to influence the conversation in a positive direction. This is not over. The systems might crash. We have to prepare to take care of ourselves and loved ones. This election cycle was an attack, economy, education, the environment and common sense. I can hardly believe that the people of our beloved country would vote in an authoritarian "Oligarchy of unlimited bribery" as Jimmy Carter called it. And it's not going to be good for the working classes that voted for the MAGA-QANON billionaires either. Hopefully you are all well. Some of my friends and a lot of lady friends are really stressed. We are stronger together. We are in this together. #UnionStrong. Blessings to all wherever you be. Conveniently located three miles from the middle of nowhere in Montgomery County. The future is organic and regenerative. #Regenerative #Economics #Organic #ClimateAction #Permaculture #Holistic #holistichealth #Biodynamic #Resilience.
How do we restore the balance between power and constraint? The concept of balance, or justice, recognises that responsability is proportional to power. We let go the hustle culture of entitlement in order to build community of accountability. Relationship beyond transaction pulls us out of porn.
I like the aspirations of regenerative economics, but please be aware: Allan Savory's claims have been debunked. See 'Regenesis' by George Monbiot for details.
@@wvhaugen.. Savory said he learned from his terrible mistakes.. and to be fair, his concept of "holistic management" was developed out of such learning and came after what you are referring to. You may not agree, but I think it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater (sometimes there is important meaning and value in what people bring to the world and this would never be appreciated if we were to completely disregard people for their errors, especially if they have expressed regret for those errors and moved onward to do better)
@@adrianhodgson4448 my problem with savory isn't the elephant killing, it's the is a climate science denialism. Although I think he has good intentions, in practice he's a merchant of doubt greenwashing ruminants.
Gaia is intermittently laughing and weeping at homo sapiens' relentless, juvenile, intellectually reductionist explanation for our impending demise. Indigenous people everywhere have a much more visceral grasp of our contemporary conundrum. "Holistic grazing"! Really?!!
Your conversations are always thought provoking, but Allan Savory’s version of regenerative agriculture has been throughly and exhaustively debunked by mainstream science. I am disappointed but not surprised that your interviewee so readily dismisses a large body of peer reviewed research. As a truth-seeker, I expect you to redress this error by interviewing the English ecologist and writer, George Monbiot. As an environmental and atmospheric scientist myself (now retired), I can vouch for Monbiot’s suitability as your next guest to explain why Savory and the many who support his ideas are misguided.
Nate, your number 2.6% per year regarding trees is irrelevant and to think about carbon sequestration only with regard to trees and not with regard to all carbon-based life contradicts the point you’re trying to make with John regarding the exponential potential of regenerative agriculture as a way of sequestering carbon, not only in trees, but also in grasslands and soil, and in all carbon based life. Becomes the new currency which it needs to and the existing economics. Super organism is persuaded to bend rather than break and channel some of the highly sequestered concentrated financial capital and to a new acid class call it natural capital color ecosystem services or simply call it life then we have an opportunity to holistically solve many of the problems in our society Through the conscious creation of local decentralized communities supported by financial capital out of enlightened self interest to translate some of that capital into life and living systems. It’s possible I’m doing it here in Hawaii. Come visit bring John with you. He and I have been talking about this for quite some time.
"If that's all there is, we may as well just go farming and fishing and sailing and whatnot." Ah-hah! Welcome to my world. As the politics fail and the economics fails, there will be no room for academia and abstractions. There will only be farming and fishing and sailing and whatnot. As for holism vs reductionism, this is not new. It's been a paradigm in anthropology for decades.
my virtual bubble of sanity as our country shudders in chaos, thank you always Nate. Needed this today
Yes
❤
I finally got through this whole conversation and i was in tears... in a time like now, this message of underlying unity, interdependence and oneness really landed. What a beautiful conversation and both your hearts are filled with gold. ❤
Sooo lovely
I'm with you 100%
Have a great day
With love
Thanking you both is not enough. YOU REGENERATE MY HUMANITY. 🎉
I'd like to regenerate into a velvet worm someday.
Thank you for this inspiring conversation. Such a wonderful antidote for a heart that is heavy from taking in all else that is happening in the world.
Nice to see two people I respect and largely align with in such a conversation.
I have been arguing with John for 13 years about the underlying systemic issues we are actually facing, and the subtle yet important differences in our understandings and paradigms.
Nate - it is far deeper than the prices. Yes, changing prices would change the specifics, but would not solve the core issues.
John is right, that exponential growth on a finite planet is not possible. That is part of it, and it is deeply more complex than that too.
The Greek root of economics is how we manage our household.
If we are to survive, then our household needs to include all of biology, all of geochemistry, all of cosmology. And we need to treat them all as complex systems, under Snowden's Cynefin framework for the management of complexity.
John is right, in terms of power, exponential growth works in the short term; but it is a growth curve that must collapse as ultimately the speed of light is a finite limit, as are mass and energy available on this planet, and in this solar system.
John is right that we need to reform the economic system, and we do need to look deeply at the patterns that have sustained and threatened life on this planet, if we are to survive long term.
John and I part company over the Gaia hypothesis, and there is something deep in those patterns, but it isn't that, and it is fundamental to our long term survival.
Evolution is deeply more complex than competition. The evolution and survival of complexity is actually based in cooperation, and that gets rapidly deeply complex.
But we humans like to simplify things, particularly if our short term advantage depends on it; and neoclassical economics is founded on the principle of competition, that competition can solve all problems, and that is demonstrably not the case.
What does seem to be the case, is that competitive systems strongly optimise to the current context, which then makes systems fragile and without resilience when that context changes.
We have a lot of issues, and they all impact on system design.
Tendencies to power - mechanisms to mitigate (building inter dependencies)
Resilience to perturbations
Long term consequences
Long term survival
Local vs long term optima
Economic vs ecological outcomes
The existing economic system is complex in one sense in that the interdependencies that lead to systemic fragility have also been the main counters to the worst of our tendencies to power and global warfare, in that every army's supply chains are interlinked. And any general knows that wars are won on logistics; getting stuff where it needs to be when it needs to be there; with all the "fog" and uncertainties of battles. And politicians who are expansionist rely on their generals. Multiple levels of strategies play out in that set of dynamics.
At 17:30 John says the idea of regenerative economics is 3 part:
1 The human economy is a living system. Nate we take 40% of net primary productivity. John made of people tools and technologies, and needs to continue.
2 Living systems science now shows patterns. John Neoclassical economics built on Newtonian thinking.
3 If the human economy is to survive, it needs to work within these 8 principles.
I go along with John that a Newtonian view of reality is not compatible with our survival, things are demonstrably much more complex and fundamentally uncertain than that; but I disagree that science is based in Newtonian thinking. Certainly, for many it is, but not all.
Some of us see science in probabilistic terms, as an eternal process of becoming less wrong, of improving our approximations so that they are more useful in more contexts. And often the old approximations remain fully useful in some sets of contexts. People who build houses all use the approximation that the earth is flat. At that scale, it works, within the margins of error in the measuring systems being used.
If you want to get across the Pacific, and get somewhere near where you want to go, then you need a round Earth model, and Newtonian mechanics. To build a functioning GPS system you need a much more complex geode, quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Are any of those ideas "Right" in any sort of ultimate sense?
I doubt it. And all are useful approximations in some sets of contexts.
The more we can treat all knowledge as "useful approximation", the more likely we are to notice when things don't quite work as expected (indicating a failure of some set of assumptions or approximations).
If we are convinced that our "Truth" is correct, then we are not going to waste time looking for evidence that it is wrong, because, why would you - it is right! We tend to get justified and defend our "Truths" against any and all threats. That sort of hubris is dangerous at every level; and we all need our useful approximations in context, in order to get anything done with any degree of safety.
In terms of reforming the economic system, it is much more like building a functioning GPS system than it is building a house. It requires of each of us both being able to accept and respect diversity, and being able to identify and mitigate cheating strategies, and being responsible, each to the highest level we are able, acknowledging fundamental uncertainties at boundaries, and some sets of unknowables. Human beings are demonstrably more complex than any human can deal with.
Much of the wisdom that is part of being human is not conscious, it is embodied, it is deep within our complex structures, and it has been put there by the deep processes of biological and cultural evolution.
We need that wisdom, and it is not enough. It has been sorted by the lessons of the past, the contexts of the past, and we are clearly entering new territory, that in some aspects (only some), have no historical precedent. We cannot ignore that wisdom from the past, and we must be able to build upon it, find its limits, and create new learnings, new wisdom, appropriate to the specifics of our contexts.
We need our science, and our strategic thinking, as well; and they are not enough.
We must understand that it is cooperation in diversity (real, uncomfortable, diversity) that holds the only real long term possibility of such security as is available in the face of the many uncertainties and threats that we demonstrably face.
Freedom is a foundational part of life, a foundational part of being human, but that freedom has to stay within the bounds of the survivable, if we are to survive. That would be nice and simple if there were clear boundaries, but in many cases there are not. In the face of unknowns, in the face of known uncertainties, we must continue exploring, being creative, being responsible, if we are to find solutions to the many known issues that we know we have, but do not yet have adequate solutions for.
Freedom without responsibility, will certainly encounter some of that vast set of vectors in the space of the possible that lead to destruction. There are far more of them, demonstrably, than survivable ones. It is so much easier to destroy than it is to build. Building is hard, and it is what we must do.
We must build understanding.
We must build trust networks.
We must build our abilities to detect and mitigate cheating on cooperation (any and all levels).
And trust is foundational to making anything complex work.
So I like John, and I see some contexts in which the particular simplification that he is championing can be useful, and in the general case, we need something much more complex - deeply, deeply more complex.
I fully align with John's idea of the intrinsic indicators of health. In an economic sense, I would say that #1 would be everyone having sufficient money to meet their basic needs.
#2 would be profit being secondary to safety and freedom, at every level, physical, ecological, social.
I applaud much of what Elon Musk is doing. If we are to have a long term future, we must get a lot of serious technology off this planet, but our focus in the near term (next 30 years), needs to be on the moon, and building infrastructure there, and then building out infrastructure made from moon mass, into local and much wider orbits.
About 41:20 John says "Things in nature are in balance", which is an over simplification.
Nature is not in balance. Nature is eternally searching, and some lessons have been learned (one way or another), and so some things are encoded in systems. Complexity requires constraints in order to exist. That can look like balance, and it is actually something dynamic.
Around 41:55 John asks "How do we restore the balance between power and constraint?"
Is that really a balance, or is it something else entirely?
Isn't it really the case that long term survival demands constraints on power - all levels, all domains, but the nature of those constraints can be very context sensitive.
Over simplifying the deep complexity present leads to huge potential for the abuse of power, which puts our existence as a species at risk.
The dynamics present are much more complex than power and constraint, and involve the idea of search (in the sense of creativity) and the idea that cooperation and trust are fundamental to the survival of higher order complexity. And that demands a willingness to identify and mitigate cheating strategies on the cooperative - all levels, all domains.
This is, actually, deeply, irreducibly, complex; and there really cannot be any useful simplifications without first acknowledging the complexity actually present, and being conscious of the uncertainties it imposes on any simplifications we may choose to employ.
I like John.
I like what he is doing.
Some of his simplifications are useful in some sets of contexts.
But the issues we need to face are actually deeply more complex than this.
I agree with him that we need to align with how life works, but that is a deeply complex subject.
At higher levels, that means, necessarily, cooperation in diversity, and that will be uncomfortable for many, and it will demand responsibility at levels too few have yet given serious consideration to, in terms of cheat detection and mitigation; in terms of maximising freedom; in terms of reducing risk to a reasonable minimum; and those two things involve massive areas of uncertainty at the margins, where currently most people seem to prefer the simple certainty of "Truth" (even though it is demonstrably in error), rather than accepting human fallibility and responsibility.
Around 49:32 Nate says "And then we founded agriculture and it started hierarchy and then surplus and then fossil fuels and then fractional reserve banking and then AI and then finance. Like finance played a role in accelerating the maximum power principle."
Kind of. That is one way of viewing history. I argue it is far from the most powerful.
If you look at life as "search", then we explore things, we try things, and we keep what seems to work.
Prior to us, life did that by modifying combinations of genes, and by a little bit of mutation.
We can do it with ideas, technologies, ways of thinking, ways of being.
Evolution has biased us to look for simple things that work, and mostly that works, but sometimes it makes us over simplify things.
We didn't evolve in a world of computers and libraries and videos and aircraft and refigerators and electricity etc. All these things are new to us, and we are using them with brains evolved to work with fire and caves.
We are capable of getting past this, but only by accepting some deep realities related to complexity and evolution.
The need for cooperation and trust.
The need to search for those who cheat on the cooperative, and stop them cheating (preferably by returning them to cooperation, by various sets of incentives).
This ability of ours, to model complex systems, and to make long term plans, could allow us to mitigate the risks that have threatened life on this planet many times before (shown clearly in the fossil record), or we could over simplify it, and self destruct as a result.
John introduces the term - chrematistic - defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "pertaining to, or engaged in the acquisition of wealth".
Around 54:20 Nate said that the ultimate goal is to amass power; but to me that is wrong. It is an over simplification of something more complex. We are the product of those things that have survived, over all the many contexts where most things did not survive. That gives us many level of tendency to that which survives. In this sense, it is survival, not power, that is the ultimate goal. Power is often a useful proxy for survival, and not always. Too much power is dangerous, as most of mythology clearly tells us. There is a sweet spot, and we, as a species, are well past it in terms of our ability to wage war.
We are much more than a "species out of context".
In a very real sense, we are an entirely new class of life. A form of life capable of searching the space of systems of complexity far faster (many orders of magnitude faster) than any form of life before us on this planet.
Yet we tend to over simplify.
We tend to ignore the depths of complexity present in living systems, because looking at it, modeling it to some reasonable approximation, is hard.
So we simplify to - evolution is competition - whereas a much more accurate simplification would be, complexity demands cooperation and responsibility to survive. But being able to see that clearly for oneself requires understanding probability, and spending many years studying the systems of life. And not many do either.
Yes our systems of finance were an amazing invention, and they are complex, but their systemic basis is too simple to survive. We must inject cooperation, responsibility, and cheat detection and mitigation into the core of the systems, or the incentive structures of those systems will destroy us, because they are too simplistic, too competitive.
We must see that freedom is a fundamental aspect of life, foundational to the definition I find most useful; and also see that freedom without appropriate levels of responsibility is always and necessarily destructive. Too little freedom we perish, too much freedom we perish (just like too little water we die of thirst, too much and we drown). There is a sweet spot, very context sensitive. Buddhism uses a metaphor of a stringed instrument tuned just so, neither too high nor too low. The Greeks had the virtue of the mean, between the vices of excess and deficiency. Reality (including us) seems to be sufficiently complex and fundamentally uncertain that the tuning point for each of us will be slightly different, in different contexts. That is part of the strength and power of cooperation in diversity.
Around 55:30 both Nate and John note that the over simplification of economic outcomes doesn't distinguish between cheating and real production, it just deals in money.
Around 57:30 John accurately characterises the dangers of over specialisation and isolation into silos. We need more generalists. I chose to be a generalist 60 years ago, and have been working at it ever since.
John does not mention the fundamental problem with markets, that they value abundance at zero. That needs much more attention.
Yes there are problems with a sole focus on efficiency, that increases risk.
John makes mention of cancer being regenerative.
This to me is an indication of the failure, the over simplification, of the paradigm.
A human being is a vast cooperative colony of cells. Cancer occurs when for some reason, cells stop communicating cooperatively with neighbours, and start using resources for replication without regard to messages from the whole.
We need our individual freedom, and we need to be conscious of our part in society. Both are necessary.
Selfish growth, without regard to the impact on the whole, is the definition of cancer. It is, to a good first order approximation, a description of the finance system.
About 1:15:00 John starts to describe what to do.
I generally align with that. And in starting with self, we need to work at many levels of self.
Start with giving our cells what they need, adequate nutrients, adequate oxygen, adequate exercise.
Next we need to work at the many levels of our consciousness. Acknowledging and managing our emotions. Gaining skills. Being a contributing member of our various communities. Being a responsible member of the ecosystem.
About 1:21:10, John nails it, and Nate accurately characterises the major risk. Things need to get bad enough to incentivise change, but not so bad that people go into survival mode and hoard. That is a narrow window, and it seems to be our only real option.
I do not like John saying that the problem is reductionism. It isn't.
The big issue is over simplifying, and stopping looking too soon, and being too confident about the simple ideas we have.
Life is complex - deeply, deeply complex.
We want simple, but reality isn't simple.
We must accept that.
We must accept eternal uncertainty.
We must accept the need for cooperation and responsibility, if we are to have any amount of freedom for any significant time.
I strongly align with both John and Nate, on caring that life continues.
The myth of separation is an instance of over simplification.
Regeneration is good, but the core issues are far deeper, and we need to go to those depths to get a system that has a reasonable probability of surviving long term.
Gracias Nate, siempre es reparador escucharte, a ti y a tus invitados. Escribo en español para añadir la diversidad que tanto te gusta.
As a layperson, I understand what living wholesomely means. Thank you both for the deep truth about the reality we've not seen yet, and thank you for not giving up on humanity.
So many useful insights and frameworks - thank you Nate and John for your work. Money has become the means and the end goal rather than just being the means to exchange energy invested.
I see people like John Fullerton similar to the old biblical prophets guiding humanity in the right direction of the future. I wish more people could receive, listen and understand messages like this. Nate has many other guests that fall into this modern day prophet category. Somehow they've been enlightened with a gift that give us hope and agency in the future.
I have enjoyed the ideas, perspective and production value of this channel over the years. Good luck with your endeavors. So long.
Such a great conversation, it's a conversation we need to be having more and more. Thank you both for the profound and deep insight.
I wish this was condensed into 30 seconds. That's about my patience level today. Thumbs up in advance.
I'm nobody and always felt that economics should place nature/environment/biosphere number 1 in consideration. Thank you both for your work.
Looking forward to joining the course John Fullerton teaches on Zoom. You learn what you know. I've known his particular "experiential theme" through experience...and now may learn about what I know! Thanks, Nate.
I went to go like this video and realized I already had. Love love love your content Nate thank you! 😊 🙏
Nate asks about people realizing their work doesn't align with their values. I suspect most people realize that after about a decade in the work force. The issue is in a society where people live paycheck to paycheck they are trapped. Few people have the luxury of being able to walk away from a job like both Nate and his guest did. Most would be in bankruptcy without their next pay check.
Not everyone can step outside the system and succeed. Most likely just drop into a lesser paid role still within the system.
The reality of which you speak seems likely to be increasingly important. The trends toward wage slavery and hopelessness, all kinds of addiction and misery, kooky theories and religiosity can be tied to (and fear of) likely decreases in standards of living. That most people of all nations must undergo this transformation before succumbing to collapse will be fascinating if not tragic. Rats in a cage.
Many investors have a similar problem right now of not knowing where to put their money for fear of losing it if a collapse occurs...
We have debt issued by banks that we class as money and if we spend it as energy we have ruined the planet. Bankruptcy for everybody and living pay check to pay check could in fact be better, at least poverty, as all money is debt means less loans being entered into and if govt chooses to put that debt into sustainable it would be better, but it will always be low impact so low consumption, if we cut out most over consumption almost all those businesses would fall over. Food medical and shelter is all we need, the easiest thing to achieve, for all, it's not like we can't if we were allowed to choose.
debt issued by banks that we class as money and if we spend it as energy we have ruined the planet. Bankruptcy for everybody and living pay check to pay check could in fact be better, at least poverty, as all money is debt means less loans being entered into and if govt chooses to put that debt into sustainable it would be better, but it will always be low impact so low consumption, if we cut out most over consumption almost all those businesses would fall over. Food medical and shelter is all we need, the easiest thing to achieve, for all, it's not like we can't if we were allowed to choose
The countercurrent of renewal, awakened life/awareness, connection to all living things and the power of the Universe, is amplified by this conversation and flows with an expanding and mighty force in response to recent developments...
Ah - thanks very much, Nate, for the introduction to John and Regenerative Economics. This is the most nuanced, systems-oriented and naturally-wholistic version of economics I've come across - compared with Doughnut, Ecological, Environmental, No Growth and Degrowth. Having life-dynamics as the core principle is both brilliant and, when pointed out, obvious.
I stepped away from a life insurance/financial planning company when it just seemed that the mission was to take insurance premiums and shuffle them around to the rest of the company. Worked with great people, but thankfully I was "called" into community work. I'd only add to John's advice, to follow the rule in the book "What color is your parachute?": Always be looking for your next job...and in the context of John's lesson, add the clause "the next job...that fits your conscience."
If money is a ticket to the energy we can't use does this make any difference overall. For efficiency to happen it can be energy saved and I worry how your sentence applies to a halving of emissions in the next five years if they get a new job while the same overall consequences happen to the planet. I might work for save the children but not much point if I still go skiing each year.
Really enjoyed this insightful conversation between Nate and John, as I have enjoyed so many episodes of this podcast. Made me reflect on values, identity, the double bind and on walking away. I time my awakening to the superorganism to my early twenties some 25 years ago (back then called rat race), at a time when I was finishing my university studies and doing my master's thesis for a tech company. My basic recognition back then as a young man was that if we'd develop those mobile services we were developing at half the pace instead of working long hours for those goals, we'd probably all be much happier in the end and some more nature could have been preserved.
Since then it has been a continuous struggle for finding a balance between values and work, taking detours every now and then in trying to find something more meaningful and then coming back to needing to earn a living and establish a decent place in the social system as it is. I agree with other commentators here that for most of us it's maybe not that easy to just walk away like Nate and John did and successfully create something meaningful outside the superorganism. So sometimes or even most of the time I feel like either a little stupid or failed for not being able to walk my values as much as I would certainly like to. Rationally I can undestand it depending on at least your financial capital, your social capital and social context, skill set, timing, and even sheer luck.
So I suspect walking away from the rat race is actually pretty much like running a startup company - every now and then some of them succeed, most don't, however. It's good that some succeed and let's be grateful for them and support them.
At any rate it has been a learning journey (although I'm every now and then losing a bit sight on what all that learning will finally be good for). Some 10+ years ago I walked away from my tech job in search for something more aligned with my values. I became entrepreneur with no real good business plan, spent some time in an initiative for ethical banking, and after personal finances started running short ended up mostly running a small business of a family member. Did that for a bit too long until I was ripe for getting a real job again, more in the field of my education. I had become more humble to understand that I'd probably enjoy that more and that I would also earn more that way.
A bit later I also worked for the public sector, kind of enjoyed that, even if it wasn't so well paid. Finally it started to bother me that yes we were addressing many topics in social sustainability there but that whole system was still extractive in terms of environmental sustainability (mostly maximizing energy and material use for social well-being of the masses under whatever budget constraints were given).
I recently switched to a listed company to work with sustainability data and reporting and continuous improvement. That's closest to my values so far and I'm glad there is an increasing number of job opportunities in this area. Doesn't entirely remove the nagging feeling that this maybe not enough in the big picture. Will not necessarily address the rebound effect Nate discussed with Daniel Smachtenberger. Will not be the kind of holistic bioregionalism espoused by Daniel Christian Wahl, yet unlike him I believe this putting it into data and numbers is definitely a step in the right direction.
I must say I'm not sure if I understand what Nate's guests mean by holism and if they all mean the same thing by it. Would be interesting to hear how they see it different from say systems dynamics, which is still a pretty rational and reductionistic pursuit, after all. Doing systems dymamics, you would sit at a computer drawing causal-loop diagrams and doing simulations, which is still pretty far from the experience of diving with dolphins (or whatever it was Daniel Christian Wahl told he was doing that inspired him to study holism).
Anyway I do see pretty much meaning in getting all that sustainability and lifecycle assessment data right on your supply chain and on your products - the ultimate vision being, I guess, as a consumer, in addition to the monetary price you would see a declaration of the impacts the production of this thing you are buying has had on the environment or on the social systems. The big question of course being: would we care even if we had that information? Would we still prioritize the experience of a new car and justify the impacts as a necessary tradeoff for the dopamine we get?
Anyway, in the meanwhile, while waiting on the consumer side, companies are already today having the market incentive to optimize down the impacts in their supply chain. Unless some holist makes a yet much clearer point for the contrary, to me it seems just getting it all reliably down to numbers using well-defined methodologies and basing decisions on those numbers would get us pretty far. Maybe a bit reductionistic, and would not be rocket science, would just need the right incentives. On the incentive side I'm seeing regulation as a driving force at least here in Europe (like CSRD, European product passport and the like). Congratulations for and good luck with the new president on the other side of the Atlantic :)
I'm also a believer in transparency and in science-based or evidence-based approaches. Not saying I wouldn't see some systemic challenges in how academia are set up these days (as I believe Nate touched on with Daniel Schmachtenberger at some point; and I believe some research type of work would have suited me well but never found myself so much at home in the academia), but still.
On that ethical banking initiative I mentioned, a major problem in my view was that some of the key people there were associated with the anthroposophical movement. In addition to that we didn't have enough skill in the team, it seemed that what was considered ethical and fundable would be fundamentally deemed by a group of elders sharing an obscure and opaque ideology. Now with all the sustainability metrics laid out in global standards and protocols and recommendations to follow, maybe we can get somewhere without need to resort to holism in the form of an ideology. Just if the will to proceed was there. A bit too many voters the world over don't seem so motivated, though, unfortunately.
Still a bit on values and identity. Tough questions. I recognize it's difficult letting go of comparing myself with peers in the same social contexts, like family members or people I studied with or work with. Going for more alignment with values and further from feeding the superorganism would mean going with a pretty much lower income level and letting go of many of the comforts in my life. So even if I abstractly think that this would be good to strive for, I have started to curiously look more at my real values, those that I really enact through my actions.
For instance, one of my real values is being able to provide a good life for my kids, meaning a certain material standard of living I'm used to and also see my peers having. Actually I believe there was a piece of research showing a pretty strong correlation between income level and CO2 emissions (acting probably also as a proxy for energy use and extractive exploitation at the same time I believe). So yeah, I guess my point is that I run into these big unresolved contradictions when I observe my values. Like I want to give my kids a good life, buy them stuff their peers would also have, while at the same time, knowing producing this stuff is pulling the rug out from under the future generations.
Would be curious if anyone else of you who live paycheck to paycheck would have some insights to share on how you have resolved some of these values and identity dilemmas!
Thanks Nate, John's Ideas for changing the perspective sounds interesting as well as necessary for future economics. Although we all know that change is easier to talk about than it is to implement...
I was wondering if what John was referring to "We need to become Chemastasis" as Alchemist, Greek spelling 300 C.E. Khemeioa-changing or transmutation base metals to a higher value. In his case a higher currency...
@@steveo5295 John Fullerton was talking about "chrematistic" which refers to the management or negotiation of money matters. It is a notion founded by Aristotle to describe the practice of accumulating means of acquisition in general, and more specifically by those who accumulate money for its own sake and not for any purpose other than personal pleasure....
You can implement change the very next second after reading this, we all must change so why not us first.
I understand the practice of accumulating money for no other purpose than that of accumulation, it becomes a numbers game or hoarding of wealth. Change on the other hand, requires a partnership with like minded people, this requires relationships and nobody jumps into a relationship without taking risks. This is why the hoarder hangs on to their wealth.
The only way a hoarder will change is an breakdown in the system or they become comfortable with small groups of like minded people with the same risks...
@@steveo5295 Change does not require a partnership and people need to stop saying wait until they get support imo. Change can happen with you, then it affects another and so on, waiting for like minded people is waiting for the first person to affect change and that influence to spread out.
we can do it, not in my lifetime but i wanna be part of the beginning. just love, no taboos, I hope this lemma will help a lot, if we can all start to follow it. thanks guys, i love you
Great program Nate, John Fullerton is a wealth of information on Regenerative futures. Going through his extensive reading list is going to take a while...🙂
It would be amazing to see Stephen Mitchell on this podcast... the scholar, writer and translator. Thank you so much for your beautiful work ❤
Nate - Hope you consider having Louis Arnoux on your podcast (he was on Rachel Donald’s Planet Critical not long ago with a SUPER important perspective re energy and economics and thermodynamics), either as a 1:1 conversation or a roundtable with any of John Fullerton, Daniel Schmachtenberger, etc etc. Bravo on this excellent episode with John Fullerton!
I was gifted a book years ago called Beyond Rangeland Conflict written by a Sierra Club employee who once thought that cattle were hooved locusts devouring the west. He interviewed a number of ranchers, visited and walked their ranges, and realized that regenerative ranching was not only possible, it could make a better living by practitioners who worked with nature's tools rather than against them. I included Holistic Management in my classes for the remainder of my career, but failed to connect it to economic thinking well. You and John Fullerton just did that well. This is an episode (as many are) that I will listen to, and act on, more than once. Thanks.
Thank you, Nate, very interesting. After years of asking myself, how paradise handles the ethical question about money, I come to the conclusion, that, to simplify our financial system all we have to do is abolish the interest worldwide. This would change our relationship with money on a fundament le level. We remove the power of self replication and make money just another tool. It would make no sense to accumulate a lot of tools if one doesn't use them. We would develop a friendship with money and use it more wisely.
How many times we humans think about money on a daily basis is shocking and tells me we created a monster controlling several aspects of our lives. In the far future, man is going to be the master and remove money from their thoughts all together.
Stay sane all.
Brill Nate, so we go off a wander to Plotkin's tune in Nature, come back and consider this gentlemans wiles when back. Need a part two to this. Something switched with election, a new energy has kicked in. How to take this man's ideas to the personal. The invest needs to be to person, to idea, growth by osmosis. Great Nate, keep shining, your in a flow........ choose everything by intuition, we all bounce off each other. You're becoming a good ant to antenna with. Heard you saying/slipping Prosocial. What about David Sloan Wilson. Cheers, rock, shine. Be seeing you.
1989 PBS series with Bill Moyers: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myths transformed my understanding of life. Watched it many times over the years particularly in hard times. Will be binge watching through the current darkness. Particularly powerful story of being one with nature before being thrown out of the garden of eden into the world of pairs of opposites hit home. Life came out of the earth, it was not injected from some heavenly deity onto the earth. Alan Watts had a beautiful story inline with Campbell's. Suppose aliens billions of years ago on a spaceship flew by earth. They looked at it and said its just a bunch of rocks. Much later they can by again and said look its peopling! Thats what some planets do.... Rambling note here as we're headed into a time of darkness.... Thanks for your work!
Trump has just been reelected...
Good luck with a regenerative future!
The faster he can crash human civilization, the faster the Earth can regenerate.
@@A3Kr0n The day will arrive when we'll all look back on this and have a good laugh... about 2 or 3 million years from now.
from the perspective of the ornate box turtle it matters not what homo sapien sits on the throne of collapse of its world
Down load your consciousness, today LOL @deepashtray5605
Excellent news
Trump has just won, and now I'm listening to two men discussing the deep insights into our current predicament...
What an extraordinary interesting time to be alive and conscious.
Profound and salient thinking and prognostication. Challenging the status quo in such manner is the way out of this environmental predicament. The question is, can we move this juggernaut sufficiently before it's too late. Right now, converts are far too few, despite the apparent shift. Something Bill Rees argues; certainly acknowledge any and all efforts of effective change, while realizing the current scale of change simply pales compared to what's needed to turn the ship.
Whether billionaires can exist without disruption depends completely on the financial status of everyone else. Failing to maintain a reasonable degree of equanimity seems to lead inevitably to community and societal breakdown.
Nate, would you consider having a round table discussion on the role authoritarianism has/will have on the Great Simplification? It seems that authoritarianism can not only aggravate, take advantage and hasten the arrival of it, but on impact forced to be the default fallback position.
Great idea, very needed. Especially if say looking at the tealeaves we see a storm of swords coming, with trade wars as supply chains "simplify"
Default into popularist border closing nationalism, while the issues are bigger than any borders.
But just like there's alot of Climate Chaos locked in that we can't dial back -even we stopped all our $hit Now.
it's an "adaptation" issue.
Adapting to a period of knee jerk bouncing between authoritarianism & anarchy. But there's an opportunity to adapt both towards better, while to adapting to both, while also pre-building deeper aligned foundations to pick up the pieces when the shouting calms down n the gieger counter returns to normal😮
Nate! Can you make all your episodes and linked content available for download before its no longer possible. Your work and information is important. Love your work and you are a inspiration for me, you may not like it but your words carry deep meaning
The audio for all of our episodes can be downloaded via the audio player on each episode's page on our website! Here is the page for this episode: www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/149-john-fullerton
Thank you Nate, great episode. Not sure I see the economy itself as a living system, other than metaphorically, but it certainly results from relationships between biological entities in a social system and it seems to make sense to, therefore, apply the same principles.
Globalization is not about efficiency. It is about empire. Every empire has sought global rule. The modern globalism is no different. It is not free market but top down control.
Nate I think it would be cool if you ask guests to bring you one word that people most likely have never heard of and teach us one new word each episode. I think it would be cool for everyone to grow their vocabulary. This episode with “Chrematistics” could be a good starting place for that idea.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrematistics
Great conversation.
I've seen a few of the miracles in the middle that nature, regenerative agriculture manifest, when you stop feeding plants hydrocarbon fertiliser the insects no longer sense that the plant is an anomaly that needs to be taken out of the gene pool. I've personally witnessed this on my farm. I follow the practises John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture shares.Allan Savory videos show creek flowing all year round in dry environments and regenerating grasslands in drought conditions. I think we humans are here to be the themostat for the biosphere over eons.
I think one of the simplest direct means by which economy could be made to fit within physical constraints, Is to have local economies fit themselves within their own physical constraints. That would largely mean being able to feed clothes, water, shelter their population from resources available within their city limits, or slightly more generously, a county. When faced with the Engineering challenge of accomplishing that then I consider that to be in an engineering/ecological challenge And you run that experiment in every community across the nation, We have the opportunity of finding some answers which I will say, will be tailored to a specific circumstance. Just like life, which relies on variety and creativity In order to meet the challenges of a ever changing world, We’ve got to end the monoculture of The modern economy which forces everything it touches into a singular pattern of operation. For all our imagines diversity and variety and products the fundamental strategy of modern civilization is incredibly narrow
learn ... stepback ... adapt ... stepback ... act .. stepback ... repeat !
The word mentioned by Mr John Fullerton is the word Chrematistics.
The original Greek word is “χρηματιστική” (chrematistiké). It comes from “χρῆμα” (chrēma), which means “money” or “thing of value.”
In ancient Greek thought, particularly by Aristotle, “chrematistics” was often associated with the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, -making money out of money-, distinct from “οἰκονομία” (oikonomia), which focused on managing resources to support a household or community sustainably.
Χρήμος = Money (note: eta not epsilon), στάσις = Stability. However, Aristotle's word may have been χρηματιστική (Chrematistics) that just means the study of wealth.
Dear Nate,
Regenerative ag ✅
Regenerative economics ✅
Regenerative development [__]
(Please reach out to Carol Sanford or Pamela Mang to round out your explorations of the 'regenerative paradigm'.. you have saved the best for last!)
Ready to forge on and focus on the work. Are you or John taking grad students? In all serious, thank you for holding this space for forward thinking.
Unfortunately, what happened yesterday is not in the equation yet for this discussion.
So imo if you put the election results in all the formulas and equations it equals a brick wall 🧱😢 we can't afford a 4 year setback. I have never wished so hard to be wrong.
You need to distinguish real and nominal growth. Nominal growth can be maintained on a finite planet...
The impassable problem at present, with wealth comes responsibility, as does power. Not an accepted parameter, and talking pain, what is that, reality says death through the tropics and countries immersed in poverty, just like the deaths of 15,000 children in Palestine, the extinction of 600,000 years of life learning productivity families.............first world responsibility, unowed, denied. Nevertheless, a good conversation echoed inside me deeply. Thanks, blokes, well done.
Thanks. Amazing
44:50 Nate asks: How do we get there without a miracle? Do we just move in that direction?
Answer: Devise solutions that have short-term, mid-term and long-term benefits. This in itself is a paradigm shift. Example: home gardens scaled up to market gardening. Example: measure energy inputs and outputs and work with smaller inputs and smaller outputs rather than large inputs and large outputs. Regenerative grazing has large inputs and if you don't get large outputs it doesn't work. Growing cover crops have small inputs and small outputs in the short-term, but large outputs over the mid- and long-term.
Amen to this last comment!
What is one thing you would do to improve planetary and human futures?
John Fullerton: "I truly believe if we could see our role, … I think the myth of separation is at the base of this. and the myth of separation allows us to believe in neoclassical economics. And neoclassical economics and the finance algorithm that it spawned is very much the root cause of the polycrisis."
Well, you are on a roll, Nate. Or maybe just pulling up the rope you've been dangling on. Or maybe your singing in the forest is attracting others of your ilk. Anyway, great guest. Thanks for the link to repurposing the surplus...
I tend to diverge from this opening statement. The efficiency in question is capitalism talent to devote human ingenuity to make ever more efficient the depletion and pillage of resources, agricultural, mineral, etc from one part of the world deliver them to the financial and industrial core. Human ingenuity is being devoted to destructive processes, not to constructive ones such as improving the productivity of small scale multi crop farms. Or the improvement of technologies to build from local materials using passive construction techniques. Or improving techniques to add sponge elements to towns and cities while making them walkable. All of these measures shift a communities economy away from the hydrocarbon pathway, and largely minimize the energy intensity those communities engage in. Modern society is very backwards. It’s not capable of surviving for any extended period of time on the set piece of territory in contrast to the natural world which has solved this problem for billions of years.
We are the butterflies 🦋
thanks
Re: the discussion in the last few minutes of this video: There is no force more in favour of “separation” than religions, in particular Judaism, and more specifically the kind of Judaism espoused by supporters of Israel. And this of course is the third rail. So I see no solution. I remind people that Milton Friedman studied to be a rabbi before turning his education to Economics. His inspiration, Hayek has been called by his peers, “a Jew in spirit”. To me, the mantra of profit maximization flows from Judaic teachings more so than other Abrahamic religions, who would seek “reasonable profits”, not the superlative. For any hope for a future for humanity, we would have to change the ethos of capitalism from “profit maximization” to one of an expectation of “reasonable profits”. Alone that concept, that people are NOT entitled to maximize their profits (because capitalism IS zero -sum, terrible for the “losers”), could change society. It is also odd that people think of America as a Christian nation, despite its touting of “American Exceptionalism “, and quest for global hegemony. This is not at all what Jesus, a humble carpenter, taught. He overturned the financiers’ money tables, and promoted values other than wealth creation.
I have been around for quite a while and see things that I know to be unsustainable or folly. Eventually reality asserts itself. The hope is that we can prevent too much damage before reality takes over.
Friends, I fully understand the perspective of the carbon pulse and risk to resources and the potential “snap” back that could cause tragedy for our lifestyles. storage capacity will be needed to store renewable energy during non-windy times or simply at night when there is significant volatility to renewables; or I suppose we should get used to a natural energy cycle with intermittent access. My question is that I’ve never heard Nate, Daniel or any guests talk about nuclear energy. Is this because of risks to war, a situation where we end up with a “nuclear pulse” way down the road, or something else entirely?? Genuine question, a genuine response would be welcomed
We’ve had two episodes on nuclear energy and there will be more. It’s not an answer on its own but it’s coming - at least more of it
Nuclear pulse, great reframing 👍
At least 2 things spring to mind peak uranium vs thorium vs peak diesel window for mining & supply chaining minerals / resources.
The greens feel more than they think, so fearing nuclear empowering weapons... Got coopted by big oil into fearmongering nuclear power n risks.
Not making the hard decisions of the would you rather civilisational drinking. game.
All Tec is just a step for consciousness to use for it's fuller expression.
Nuclear I feel is a great stepping stone, but green button not red.
It has been covered by default as well with other topics like all the products we get out of oil, we wouldn't get from nuclear. The UK for instance, 15.68% of total energy is just electricity and still a lot of that generation is gas. At the moment renewables are around 2% of total energy, it would mean a 3500% increase in plants and that's just for electricity, not the embedded energy in products that can't have a replacement because there is no replacement for oil, a product we didn't create.
Wonderful discussion, thank you.
Postcapitalism now! We're establishing a free 24-hour eco hub fab-lab café third place regenerative cosmolocal community node... here on Kalapuya Land, Eugene Oregon USA. Would love to network and collaborate. 🌱
I'd like to make a guest suggestion. Chris Martenson, who has been such an important pioneer in this space.
An "adolescent stage of development" - like a few drunken teenagers speeding down a dark country road with a bridge out!
I blame that rock 'n roll music
Are you guys across Michael’s Hudson’s work? (Love your work by the way) does he offer a way out of the double bind?
Chremastike
Ma Earth Regenerative Finance is trying to see this.
This has many of the same properties as permaculture. Everything is truly connected and one thing
"How do we restore the balance between power and restraint" he asks... I suggest we have an economic system that mimics the asymmetry of power we see in nature (the fox and the hare analogy) whereby the essence of competition within the economic system dictates that the richest can only be a certain degree more rich than the poor.
I wonder if permaculture can help understand this. In this we plan only the big structures that might limit where we grow. Then we build guilds, each is complete in themselves when finished but small built one at a time. Throughout we mimic nature, and each system is unique and a certain amount of trial and error, hope and miracle is involved as well.
So in culture and business we need those big structures though exactly what those are you guys will probably have to figure that out. Those guides is my farm and others dreams each one when complete will highly fruitful but through trail and error and hope and miracle. Its this second part that in motion everywhere throughout the world, perhaps these might lead to those structures.
Data scientists are well aware of multivariable equation. Those other scientists sound about 100 years in the past
Don’t confuse financial system with the investment system!!!
Replacing wildlife with cattle on grasslands to "mimic" their ecological role is, in my view, far from a holistic approach. This is the essence of what I see as a "Savory swindle." While it might provide some benefits in areas devoid of native grazers, it ultimately supports wildlife displacement rather than their restoration. This approach doesn’t work universally on all grasslands-such as dry grasslands, areas west of the Rockies where bison were absent, or lands where forests were cleared to create pasture.
Rotational grazing often requires significant fencing infrastructure, creating smaller, controlled paddocks for cattle movement. I find the language used here misleading. I would much rather see efforts focused on repopulating grasslands with wildlife for several reasons. Livestock management generally aims to control disease (like brucellosis or bovine tuberculosis, diseases introduced to native wildlife from European cattle), manage predation, and reduce competition for forage. Additionally, livestock grazing can alter plant communities, often resulting in the loss of indigenous food and medicinal plants, the trophic downgrading of planet earth, and methane emissions.
It’s clear that livestock management tends to favor homogenous landscapes, yet we need diverse habitats to support a thriving biodiversity. Despite this, terms like "regenerative," "holistic," or "rotational grazing" are commonly used to describe these practices. That said, I appreciate the analogy to the economy-it’s a brilliant way to illustrate regenerative economics, sparking new ways of thinking for the audience. Well done!
Living on the edge of the great sagebrush desert, cattle and grasslands are a horrible combination. One cow can decimate diversity over a vast area. Some plants will just not survive their appetites. A small herd will destroy stream banks.
Last month I took a trip into the hills. This is border lands between forest and sagebrush. I took a walk along a dry creek bed with established pines. These pines were 16" up to 20" in diameter, which is very rare considering the heavy lumber cutting and the multiple fires. The ground between trees looked mowed. No bush, no grass, just tree trunks and multiple piles of cow pies. The end of the hike I came to a sign the advertised "This area under habitat restoration." Lip stick on a pig.
My bubble is not as rosy as Nates. Too many locals would gladly string up tree huggers. America a round here is going to get real great real fast. Almost everyone is cheering the election results. I keep thinking Industrial civilization has got to go, and Donald Trump is just the man to do it.
You might get be right, but not for the reasons frustrated people voted for him
Economists need to learn Bayesian analysis. The also need to unlearn statistics to do so.
I think asking what the “definition” of a living system is misleading, as there are so very many kinds one might try to squeeze into the term. From general systems view, all observable “systems” are recognized from their cohesion, their property of holding together that is what the term “system” evolved from in the earliest oral traditions that survived.
Holding together is also a physical property of adaptivity, and if you ask how that developed, the origin is always growth, a sign of animated life. However, .. There’s a danger in misusing terms to the limit. So I refer ‘life’ and ‘living’ only in context to carefully avoid solipsism.
‘Someone’ is ‘pessimistic’?
“So the thesis of this book stands or falls with the correctness of the decline rate that Brown gives us. Therefore I have calculated with several different parameters as regards the decline rate, and all point in the same direction. The difference be tween them is a few years at most. Therefore I assume that my thesis is solid, which is that the end of global net oil exports in 2030-2032 (Brown’s scenario) is a best-case scenario.
Collapse can, I think, begin in earnest already in 2026, only because of too little diesel exports. Observe that oil exports vanish successively, more and more, not all at once.”?
lars-larsen-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports
Hey Nate, i really appreciate the discussions you are hosting. I would highly recommend hosting Joel Salatin if you can. I think he will have some practical insights into how individuals, families and communities can work together to shift into regenerative economic enterprises and focus more on Generous Domestic Practice vs Gross Domestic Product. I think he’ll also have insights into what many of your guests bring up from time to time - that our human flourishing on this ecological spaceship Earth is dependent upon a core moral ethic. As such, I would suggest reaching out to folks whose understanding of their faith leads them in that practice of moral ecological stewardship. Unfortunately, not everyone who claims a particular faith is understanding and practicing what that faith actually teaches. Ghandi famously observed this when he was looking for a moral basis for a just Indian society before Indian independence.
Cows on grass!
Right on, Allan Savory!
Ecological succession economics
Oops. at 44:00 is to go from 'finger' to 'finger'...how many of those 'fingers' before we get 'the moon'.
More than anything now, we must have a change of our point of view from separateness to a holistic view of the country and the world. I believe that We can still fix this Climate Crisis . I am more than anything an agriculturalist. We are going to have to adopt a regenerative paradigm. We can do this.
Now is the time to unite. I hope to influence the conversation in a positive direction. This is not over. The systems might crash. We have to prepare to take care of ourselves and loved ones. This election cycle was an attack, economy, education, the environment and common sense. I can hardly believe that the people of our beloved country would vote in an authoritarian "Oligarchy of unlimited bribery" as Jimmy Carter called it. And it's not going to be good for the working classes that voted for the MAGA-QANON billionaires either. Hopefully you are all well. Some of my friends and a lot of lady friends are really stressed. We are stronger together. We are in this together. #UnionStrong. Blessings to all wherever you be. Conveniently located three miles from the middle of nowhere in Montgomery County.
The future is organic and regenerative.
#Regenerative #Economics #Organic #ClimateAction #Permaculture #Holistic #holistichealth #Biodynamic #Resilience.
How do we restore the balance between power and constraint? The concept of balance, or justice, recognises that responsability is proportional to power. We let go the hustle culture of entitlement in order to build community of accountability. Relationship beyond transaction pulls us out of porn.
I like the aspirations of regenerative economics, but please be aware: Allan Savory's claims have been debunked. See 'Regenesis' by George Monbiot for details.
good episode, he loses some credibility for working with Allan Savory though sadly
Yeah, it's hard to take Savory seriously when he killed 40,000 elephants.
@@wvhaugen.. Savory said he learned from his terrible mistakes.. and to be fair, his concept of "holistic management" was developed out of such learning and came after what you are referring to. You may not agree, but I think it's important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater (sometimes there is important meaning and value in what people bring to the world and this would never be appreciated if we were to completely disregard people for their errors, especially if they have expressed regret for those errors and moved onward to do better)
@@adrianhodgson4448 my problem with savory isn't the elephant killing, it's the is a climate science denialism. Although I think he has good intentions, in practice he's a merchant of doubt greenwashing ruminants.
😎
Gaia is intermittently laughing and weeping at homo sapiens' relentless, juvenile, intellectually reductionist explanation for our impending demise. Indigenous people everywhere have a much more visceral grasp of our contemporary conundrum. "Holistic grazing"! Really?!!
yes from the perspective of the ornate box turtle it matters not what homo sapien sits on the throne of collapse of its world
Where's the Wal-Mart loam.
Systems need redundancy for reliability and resilience.
Your conversations are always thought provoking, but Allan Savory’s version of regenerative agriculture has been throughly and exhaustively debunked by mainstream science. I am disappointed but not surprised that your interviewee so readily dismisses a large body of peer reviewed research. As a truth-seeker, I expect you to redress this error by interviewing the English ecologist and writer, George Monbiot. As an environmental and atmospheric scientist myself (now retired), I can vouch for Monbiot’s suitability as your next guest to explain why Savory and the many who support his ideas are misguided.
Nate, your number 2.6% per year regarding trees is irrelevant and to think about carbon sequestration only with regard to trees and not with regard to all carbon-based life contradicts the point you’re trying to make with John regarding the exponential potential of regenerative agriculture as a way of sequestering carbon, not only in trees, but also in grasslands and soil, and in all carbon based life. Becomes the new currency which it needs to and the existing economics. Super organism is persuaded to bend rather than break and channel some of the highly sequestered concentrated financial capital and to a new acid class call it natural capital color ecosystem services or simply call it life then we have an opportunity to holistically solve many of the problems in our society Through the conscious creation of local decentralized communities supported by financial capital out of enlightened self interest to translate some of that capital into life and living systems. It’s possible I’m doing it here in Hawaii. Come visit bring John with you. He and I have been talking about this for quite some time.
"If that's all there is, we may as well just go farming and fishing and sailing and whatnot." Ah-hah! Welcome to my world. As the politics fail and the economics fails, there will be no room for academia and abstractions. There will only be farming and fishing and sailing and whatnot.
As for holism vs reductionism, this is not new. It's been a paradigm in anthropology for decades.
p
The liar king is about to be crowned! The metacrisis mayhem begins! This is irrelevant.