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Every month John Fullerton hosts a Dialogue on a current and vital topic with relevance to economics and finance. We draw on our extensive global network of global thought leaders with specific topic expertise to engage in this live dialogue. RSVP for our next live dialogue and catchup on the archives below in the meantime!
On December 4th at 12 PM ET on “ESG Blowback: Activist Investors and the Future of Investor Activism”, we dug into what’s really happening with ESG, how investors are pushing for change, and what all this means for the future of capitalism. Whether you’re a finance professional or just wondering the true potential of ESG in re-imaging the future of finance, this is a discussion you don’t want to miss!
Danielle Lanyard is the founder of big deep digital, a firm led by an environmentally focused entrepreneur whose career path has been at the intersection of sustainability, technology and storytelling. Danielle’s background of life & work experience includes environmental study, community action, and startup development, beginning as a child working on her first local campaign and charity fundraiser, and now spanning two decades and four continents. After taking Capital Institute’s Regenerative Economics course, Danielle joined forces with Jessica Groopman to co-found The Regenerative Technology Project.
Spencer B. Beebe, Ecotrust Founder and Board Chairman, earned his M.F.S. (Forest Science) degree in 1974 from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a B.A. in Economics from Williams College in 1968. He served with the Peace Corps in Honduras from 1968-71 and, after serving 14 years with The Nature Conservancy as Northwest representative, Western Regional Director, Vice President and President of the Nature Conservancy’s International Program, he was the founding President of Conservation International in 1987. In February 1991, Spencer founded Ecotrust; with Shorebank Corporation of Chicago he helped found ShoreBank Pacific, the first environmental bank, now Beneficial State Bank. And ShoreBank Enterprise Pacific, now Craft3. He is the author of Cache: Creating Natural Economies. Currently a Founder and Managing Partner of Salmon Nation Trust.
A global regenerative economy will be built on a foundation of bioregional place-based and place-sourced initiatives. However, there is no infrastructure within current financial markets to catalyze this essential regenerative development to heal degraded ecosystem function. On Thursday, June 27th at 12pm EDT (New York) John Fullerton welcomed Samantha Power, Regenerative Economist, Futurist, and Bioregionalist, for a discussion on Bioregional Financing Facilities, the missing link to catalyze capital flows toward landscape scale regeneration.
Samantha Power is a Co-Founder and the Director of the forthcoming BioFi Project and the Founder and Principal Consultant of Finance for Gaia. She is a Regenerative Economist, Futurist, and Bioregionalist based in Oakland, CA on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people. She is a co-author of the book, Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. Samantha believes we need to build a new layer in the global financial architecture to halt the sixth mass extinction and she is dedicating her life to doing just that.
For 15 years now, Samantha has been asking “How do we change where money is flowing so that it supports, rather than destroys, life?” This question has taken her to many different geographies, communities, and institutions — from rapidly disappearing rainforests across Southeast Asia, women’s community lending circles in Myanmar, the US Treasury Department, the UN, the World Bank, as well as the ecological and social impact investing community.
Ultimately, it landed her amidst the redwoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Samantha took stock of what she had learned trying to change financial flows from the top down. She began deepening her listening to the people she saw doing the most urgent work in the world right now: regenerating the Earth’s lands and waters. She learned that the Indigenous land stewards, regenerative farmers, community builders, and regenerative systems designers from around the world were not able to access the financial resources needed to support their critical work, and imagined a set of new bioregional-scale financial institutions and infrastructure, strategically coordinated to change ecosystems and economic systems at scale.
Samantha channeled what she learned into a new book: Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet. The book makes the case for, and explains how to build systems and infrastructure to shift capital to place-based regenerators to achieve global climate and nature-related goals, while enabling the transition to regenerative economies. To turn this vision into a global movement, Samantha co-founded the BioFi Project — a collective of experts supporting bioregions around the world to design, build, and implement BFFs inspired by the templates laid out in the book.
Our collective future depends upon our ability to restore the Earth’s degraded land: our common land. On Thursday, April 25th at 12pm ET (New York) John Fullerton welcomed Willem Ferwerda, Founder, Commonland for a hope filled dialogue on a practical and holistic approach towards restoring and regenerating 100 million hectares of the world’s degraded landscapes by 2040. They discussed the challenges and opportunities of scaling a regenerative approach that reconnects entire ecosystems, including people, communities, and businesses, with life.
On Thursday, March 28th, 2024 at 12pm ET (New York) John Fullerton welcomed Peter Victor for a dialogue on the blaring fact that Earth is in overshoot, but does it really need to be this way? We are using more material than the earth naturally regenerates, and the human economy is overloading the planet with our increasing volume of waste. Climate change is but one of the deadly symptoms, and political debates over abstractions such as Net Zero, ESG are a distraction. The immense complexity of managing our way out of overshoot demands rigorous analysis and fresh imagination. Join two celebrated non-conventional economists in an enriching dialogue on some of the key questions and insights into how we might escape overshoot.
On Thursday, February 29th, 2024 John Fullerton welcomed Nate Hagens for an exploration of how our energy blind economists, policy makers and business leaders have undermined our prospects for a smooth energy transition. We discussed the implications of energy blindness across the intersection of geopolitics, economics, climate policy, and – of course – energy, and how a regenerative perspective can help us discover fresh potential presently unseen as the source of genuine transformation to a more prosperous future.
On, Thursday, November 30, 2023 at 12pm EDT John Fullerton welcomed Nora Bateson (featured Introduction to Regenerative Economics Thought Leader), to discuss the pitfalls of conventional fixes when we are trying to re-awaken ourselves to a new way of seeing, being, leading and thinking in the 21st century. This conversation challenged us to rethink the essence of human discernment and decision making if we are to successfully navigate and transcend the polycrisis.
Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Her work asks the question “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”. An international lecturer, researcher and writer, Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016 is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity.
The IBI integrates the sciences, arts and professional knowledge to create a qualitative inquiry of the integration of life. As President, Nora directs research projects at the IBI that require multiple contexts of research and interdependent processes. Asking, “How can we create a context in which to study the contexts?”, an impressive team of international thinkers, scientists and artists have been brought together by the IBI to generate an innovative form of inquiry, which Nora coined “Transcontextual Research”.
41-year career with Triodos Bank NV, since the foundation in 1980, acting as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chair of the Executive Board since 1997. Triodos Bank has grown into a mid-size (Balance Sheet Total: EUR 23 billion and 1,500 employees) European, fully licensed bank with a strong environmental and social mission. The bank serves through its network in 5 European countries over 700,000 customers. The bank has become a globally recognized successful frontrunner in sustainable, social-inclusive banking and the management of 20 high-rated investment funds.
Personally, I had a strong and high-level involvement over decades in developing ‘sustainable finance’ on a visionary/system-level as well in the day-to-day banking and finance practice. And more importantly: how to connect them. In that context, I founded and built a successful movement for value-based banking worldwide (GABV) with more than 75 member banks and co-founded the Sustainable Finance Lab in the Netherlands, now a highly influential academic Think Tank. The ‘red thread’ in all this is ‘Finance Change, Change Finance’ – Peter Blom
On Thursday, May 25, 2023 John Fullerton welcomed Jessica Groopman and Jeremy Lent (featured Introduction to Regenerative Economics Thought Leader) to discuss the realities of artificial intelligence as we shift from the machine age to the regenerative age.
On Thursday, March 23, 2023 John Fullerton welcomed Clara Miller, Raj Thamotheram, and Bill Baue for a Dialogue on “ESG Dust Up: Confusion and Conflation.”
Dr Raj Thamotheram is a globally recognized pioneer and author in the field of long-term and sustainable investment.
His roots are in medicine and the NGO community and he has taken this public health and system change experience into the investment industry where he has worked as head of responsible investing at one of the UK’s biggest pension funds (USS) and then at a global fund manager (AXA IM).
He has played a founding role with several sustainable finance initiatives (including Managing Pension Funds as if the Long-Term Matters competition, Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change, Enhanced Analytics Initiative, Pharma Shareowners Group, Pharma Futures), he was part of the core group that designed the UN Principles of Responsible Investment and he is on the board of or advises several non-profit think-tanks including the Council on Economic Policies, Preventable Surprises and the Shareholder Commons.
In Episode 2 of Capital Institute’s Discovery Dialogue Series, John Fullerton welcomed L. Randell Wray for a Dialogue on “A Non-Newtonian Response to Inflation (Recorded February 23, 2023).
L. Randall Wray is the 2022-2023 Teppola Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University and Professor of Economics at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He has also taught at Bard College, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Denver. He is one of the developers of Modern Money Theory and his newest book is Making Money Work for Us (Polity, November 2022). A companion illustrated guide to MMT is forthcoming in March: Money For Beginners (with Heske Van Doornen, Polity).
Other recent books include Why Minsky Matters (Princeton, 2016), A Great Leap Forward (Elsevier, January 2020), and Handbook of Economic Stagnation (Elsevier, 2022 with Flavia Dantas). Wray is the author of a textbook, Macroeconomics (with Mitchell and Watts; Red Globe Press, 2019).
Wray has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, Bergamo, Rome, UNAM in Mexico City, UNICAMP in Brazil, and Tallinn University in Estonia. He is the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award winner for lifetime contributions to Institutionalist Thought.
Charly Kleissner is a former Silicon Valley senior technology executive and is now an impact investor. He was the CTO at Ariba, worked for Steve Jobs at NeXT, and is associated with the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society. He believes that the real meaning of wealth is to make a positive contribution to humanity and the planet. He is a leader of the deep impact movement which is not only treating the symptoms of our failing economic system, but its root causes – with a level of awareness and consciousness that is non-anthropocentric, acknowledging that humanity is part of the evolutionary process, not outside of it. He sees impact investing not as an intellectual exercise, but as an expression of who he really is.
Jessica Groopman has spent her career researching how emerging technologies impact humans, business, and broader ecosystems. For more than 15 years, she has advised innovation leaders around the world on digital transformation, market trends, and how to unlock new value through humane and regenerative technological design. Her current research focuses on how organizations can combine cutting edge technologies and business models to achieve net positive outcomes for a wider range of stakeholders. In her current role as Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation at Intentional Futures, Jessica works with organizations to develop long-term innovation strategies that align economic, societal, and environmental benefit.
Prior to IF, she founded and ran research firm, Kaleido Insights, and has been principal analyst with Tractica, Harbor Research, and Altimeter Group where she led research practices in artificial intelligence, IoT, blockchain, automation, robotics, mixed reality, data privacy, and more. Past clients range from large brands including Google, Microsoft, Cisco, AARP, Technicolor, Intel, Pandora, to an array of think tanks, media companies, and several start-ups she advises.
Jessica is a regular keynote speaker and panelist at emerging technology industry events. She is also a frequent contributor to numerous media outlets. She has also served as contributing member of the CalState CX Advisory Board, International IoT Council, the IEEE’s Internet of Things Group, and FC Business Intelligence’s IoT Nexus Advisory Board. Jessica was also included in Onalytica’s list of the 100 Most Influential Thought Leaders in IoT. When she’s not ideating about the future, Jessica can be found on a hike, playing drums, cooking, and spending time with her partner in the Bay Area. Learn more about Intentional Futures here, or about Jessica on her LinkedIn, connect on Twitter or at these upcoming events, and find all past research at jessgroopman.com.
Every month John Fullerton will host a Dialogue on a current and vital topic with relevance to economics and finance. We will draw on our extensive global network of global thought leaders with specific topic expertise to engage in dialogue with John.
We draw on David Bohm’s,* On Dialogue and Danny Martin’s concept of “Mindfulness Dialogue” to guide our conversations. The roots of the word “dialogue” come from the Greek words dia meaning “through” and logos which means “the divine wisdom manifest in creation” or simply “meaning”. Our Discovery Dialogues therefore do not follow the standard “interview the expert” design of many podcasts. Rather, John and one or two thought leaders will seek to illuminate wisdom through mindful engagement on the topic of the moment, first among themselves, and then including our audience. To do this, we will explore the topic using our Eight Principles of Regenerative Vitality as our compass.** Our goal will be to uncover fresh perspectives and possible pathways forward not previously considered by any of the participants, in other words, emergent understanding and actionable ideas.
Meet John Fullerton
John Fullerton is an unconventional economist, impact investor, writer, and some have said philosopher. He is the architect of Regenerative Economics, first conceived in his 2015 booklet, “Regenerative Capitalism: How Universal Patterns and Principles Will Shape the New Economy.”
After a successful 20-year career on Wall Street where he was a Managing Director of what he calls “the old JPMorgan,” John listened to a persistent inner voice and walked away in 2001 with no plan but many questions. The questions crystalized into his life’s work with the creation of the Capital Institute in 2010. John’s work is now featured in the 8 week online course: “Introduction to Regenerative Economics: New Ways of Seeing, Thinking, Being and Managing for the 21st Century” which has been experienced by over 500 people from 40 countries in its first year.
A committed impact investor, John is the co-founder and Chairman of New Day Enterprises, PBC, the co-founder of Grasslands, LLC, and a board member of Aquasafra, and the Savory Institute. He is an advisor to numerous sustainability initiatives, and is a member of the Club of Rome. John was featured in the 2021 award winning documentary, Going Circular.
New Ways of Seeing, Thinking, Being and Managing for the 21st Century: You’re invited to join over +1500 professionals, leaders, students, policymakers, and thought-leaders from over 53 countries who have already started a collective journey to reimagine our economy as a source of ecological harmony and equitable well-being throughout the world. The next cohort begins in September 2024.
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