INTRODUCING MONTHLY discovery dialogues

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.

Episode 6: Climate Heroes | Live: September 28, 2023 at 12pm EDT (New York)

We invite you to join us for our next Live Discovery Dialogue, Thursday, September 28, 2023 as John Fullerton welcomes two of his climate heroes, Bill McKibben and Gus Speth, to share the stories of their commitment to fighting the climate crisis through their life’s work. As we come to the end of the summer from hell, and symptoms of climate change like record heatwaves and disastrous flooding endure, we are looking forward to a refreshing dialogue on the potential of our regenerative pathways forward. RSVP to get the Zoom link to join us live.

Meet Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, and a founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 to work on climate and racial justice. He founded the first global grassroots climate campaign, 350.org, and serves as the Schumann Distinguished Professor in Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2014 he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the ‘alternative Nobel,’ in the Swedish Parliament. He’s also won the Gandhi Peace Award, and honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He has written over a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature, published in 1989, and his latest book is The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.

Meet Gus Speth

Gus Speth now serves as Distinguished Next System Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative and as an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. In 2009 Speth completed his decade-long tenure as Dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, now the Yale School of the Environment. From 1993 to 1999, he was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality (Carter Administration); and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council. He served on the faculty of the Vermont Law School as Professor of Law from 2010 to 2015 and is now a fellow of the Tellus Institute and VLS and an honorary director at NRDC and WRI.

PAST EPISODES

Episode 5: Banking Crisis: Patterns and Principles

Meet Peter Blom

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

Episode 4: Getting Real about Artificial Intelligence

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.

Episode 3: ESG Dust up: Confusion and Conflation

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.”

Clara Miller

Clara Miller writes and speaks about social sector finance and impact investing. She founded the Nonprofit Finance Fund and was its President/CEO from 1984-2011. She is President Emerita of the Heron Foundation, having served as President from 2011-2017.

Miller is an advisory board member for the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, the Song Cave and the Sustainability Advisory Board at the University of New Hampshire. She is a corporator of Walden Mutual Bank. Miller served as a board member of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (2012-2019) and was a Bridgespan Fellow 2018-2020.

In 1996, Miller was appointed to the U.S. Treasury’s first Community Development Advisory Board for the then-newly-created Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and later became Chair. She chaired Opportunity Finance Network’s board for six of her nine years as a member and served on the Community Advisory Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for eight years.

Miller was named seven times to the Nonprofit Times “Power and Influence Top 50,” (2006-2017), to Inside Philanthropy’s “50 Most Powerful Women in U.S. Philanthropy for 2016 and 2017 and as Social Innovator of the Year by the University of New Hampshire in 2017. In 2015 she was named “Investor of the Year, Small Foundations,” by Institutional Investor Magazine, received the Prince’s Prize (Monaco) for Innovative Philanthropy and the Shining Star Award from Performance Space 122 in New York City. She was awarded a Bellagio Residency by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2010.

Ms. Miller has been published in Alliance, Financial Times, Medium, The Atlantic Blog, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Nonprofit Quarterly and Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has spoken at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Edinburgh International Culture Summit, Yale School of Management, Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Columbia Business School, Aspen Ideas Festival, Sciences Po, Oxford Said Business School, Bloomberg L.P., and SoCap.

Bill Baue

As an internationally recognized expert on Sustainability Context (Thresholds & Allocations), Thriveability, and Online Stakeholder Engagement, Bill Baue catalyzes systemic transformation. As a serial social entrepreneur, he has co-founded and instigated several enterprises: r3.0, Science Based Targets, Sustainability Context Group,Sea Change Radio, and Currnt.

Baue currently serves as Senior Director of r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), a not-for-profit common good that networks a global community of Positive Mavericks focused on transcending incrementalism to trigger necessary transformations that enact living systems principles. In this role, he serves as the Systems Convener for the Connecticut River Valley Bioregional Collaborative of the Capital Institute’s Regenerative Communities Network.

Baue has worked with prominent organizations across the sustainability ecosystem, including Audubon, Cabot Creamery Coop, Ceres, GE, Harvard, several United Nations agencies (UNCTAD, UNEP, UNGC, UNRISD, etc…), Walmart, and Worldwatch Institute. He serves on the Board of Co-op Power and as Senior Advisor to Preventable Surprises, and he is a certified Prosocial facilitator.

He lives near the Connecticut River Valley bioregion, where his daughters Clara, Emma, and Aoife periodically visit. He is a diehard Deadhead who enjoys camping, hiking, mountain climbing, kayaking, yoga, meditation, and dancing contact improvisation.

Dr Raj Thamotheram

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.

Episode 2: A Non-Newtonian Response to Inflation

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

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.

Episode 1: From Cryto Winter to Refi Spring

In Episode 1 of Capital Institute’s Discovery Dialogue Series, “From Crypto Winter to Refi Spring – Steering technology toward the service of life,” John Fullerton welcomed special guests Jessica Groopman & Charly Kleissner (Recorded January 26, 2023).

Charly Kleissner

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

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.

About Capital Institute's Discovery Dialogues

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 500 professionals, leaders, students, policymakers, and thought-leaders from over 40 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 2023.