Climate Week at Caravan of Dreams #1 · Cleaned Transcript
September 21, 2026 · Caravan of Dreams, East Village, NY
Recorded on the house mic. This is a cleaned and condensed transcript: filler trimmed, crosstalk smoothed, the shape of the morning kept intact. It is not verbatim. Names and figures were checked against primary sources where the recording was unclear.
Download as .txtFullerton · Thank you all for coming, and thank you, Ben, for the invitation, and for what you are doing here. This is a small glimpse of what a regenerative economy might feel like, in millions of little ways. In keeping with that, I am not going to sell my books today. I am going to give them away. I want one thing in return: write a review on Amazon if you feel moved, because the algorithm runs book sales and we want this to reach people. I am not sure I have enough for everybody.
I love small, intimate gatherings that are not in an institutional setting. So let us start by picking up where Ben left off. Turn to a neighbor you do not know. If you are next to a friend, you have to move. I am going to ask a question, and your assignment is to take the first thought that comes to mind and give that as your answer. You cannot think about it. The question is: how did you get here? You cannot say the subway. I mean it in a more metaphysical sense. Be as honest and as vulnerable as you can. Thirty seconds each. It could be one word, curiosity, fear. It could be a little story.
We have about an hour and a half, which is luxurious. I will answer the same question myself, then there are slides to keep me on task, split into a diagnosis and, honestly, Ben, we did not rehearse this, there is no solutions section in this deck. There is a compass and better questions section. The creative part, the artistic part, is all of us, because if anyone thinks they know how to solve the problems we are dealing with, they have not thought about them deeply enough yet.
Fullerton · I came out of college bright-eyed and went to work at Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, the most prestigious, highly ethical bank you could find. Globalization had been planted in my head in college and that seemed the best place to learn about it. I rode the globalization wave and the securitization wave, I did derivatives, and I grew increasingly anxious. What am I doing? Is this the purpose of my life? A little voice would whisper, then I would get a new assignment in a new country and get excited again. When the merger with Chase happened it was clear the culture was going to die. Brawn bought brain. Most of us in senior positions left within the first year, and I knew I had walked out not just of what was then called JPMorgan but of my career, because I did not want another job doing that.
I promised myself the summer off. I had begun doing impact investing inside Morgan in 1997, aligning capital with social and ecological purpose, and I had invested in a charter school company. My first day back into Manhattan I had a 9:30 meeting downtown. I was in the subway at nine, and at City Hall a man came into the car and announced they had just flown a plane into the trade center. I made my way to the street and came out at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge in time to watch the second plane explode out of the second tower. So there I was: unemployed, no career, no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up, 41 years old, three young kids at home, and the world turned inside out. When I got home I could not begin to explain to my kids what world they were going to grow up in.
I have come here from 9/11, 25 years ago, and I have been on a search ever since. I have thought about what we now call the polycrisis or the metacrisis most days since. I read Limits to Growth, the 1972 MIT study that had this pretty much figured out: exponential growth on a finite planet is not going to work, and that alone is a physics problem that does not get solved by politics. Around 2004 I did a systems science workshop with Dennis Meadows, one of the scientists on that project. We literally stood in a circle holding hands to show how feedback loops work. Afterward someone asked him: Dennis, you have talked about collapse as the likely outcome if we keep doing what we are doing. How will we know when we have reached the collapse phase? He said, that is easy. The first thing to go will be our ability to cope. That has been sitting with me since roughly 2004.
Does everyone know the polycrisis? And the metacrisis, which is more obscure? Someone give me theirs.
From the room · A way to describe not only the physical realities of all these interconnected crises, in finance, economics, the environment, AI, jobs, but also the generative dynamics that give rise to all of them.
Fullerton · Good enough. I would go a layer deeper, and I did not invent this. The root, to me, is the myth of separation: that men are separate from women, that the left brain is separate from the right, that humans are separate from a thing we call nature, that Black people are separate from white people, that immigrants are separate from the rest of us. It is rooted in deep culture and it accelerated with the Western scientific revolution. The Newtonian, mechanistic way we have been taught to think forces us to fragment things in ways we are not even conscious of. So we do not see root causes. We see symptoms and call them problems, and if we are in tech we think the purpose of life is to solve problems, and if we are in finance we think it is to optimize the return on capital, which is itself a fragmentation. The polycrisis is the interwoven social, political, ecological, financial thing none of us is smart enough to hold in its entirety. Above it is the myth of separation, and all our efforts in sustainable business and ESG over the last twenty years have yet to confront it.
Fullerton · I call this the art and science of regenerative economics for a reason. Fritjof Capra teaches that life is inherently creative. Economics as a science is a false science, as I am about to show you. The real science, if you buy this worldview, is ecology, systems ecology, and we built neoclassical economics on outdated Newtonian physics instead. Nobody talks about the art part, which is the creativity we are all called to participate in as a new economic system is born. I use the word not to make it feel good because Ben is here, but because I believe we are being called into a creative project. It is a revolution not of discovery but of a new way to see what everyone is already looking at.
How many of you are genuinely interested in economics? A couple. Most people are not, and it is dry and abstract, but the economy is the water we are all swimming in. We accept the story our culture tells us without the ability to question it unless we have studied economics, and if we have, we have been brainwashed into the story. There are not a lot of people walking around who have experience inside this system and the ability to see it from outside, and that is my small contribution. Economics is far too important to be left to the economists.
We are in a paradigm shift. When I started this work I had no idea. Now it seems self-evident that something big is shifting. The last shift this profound was from the medieval age to the modern age, with Copernicus's hypothesis that the Earth is not the center of the universe. That was very challenging to the powers of the day, because if the Earth is not the center, then the church at the center of the Earth is not so special, and its reading of God's wishes becomes suspect. For fifteen hundred years, from Aristotle's time, astronomers had explained why the planets, all supposedly circling the Earth, would go forward and then reverse and then go on again. There is a word for the wobbles: epicycles. For a thousand years scientists made stuff up and patched the theory, because the theory had to be true. When Galileo proved Copernicus right he was put under house arrest and told never to talk about it. Paradigm shifts do not come easy. I would suggest this one is at least as big, in how we perceive what we think we are looking at, and the consequences are more profound because of the scale of the human footprint on the planet. And if you doubt how hard it is to let go of a paradigm: we still call it a sunrise and a sunset.
Fullerton · Then Isaac Newton came along with his mechanistic laws of gravity, clearly a genius, and the concept of a clockwork universe was born: the entire world we know is a machine, whether or not God started it. Mechanistic thinking, rooted in Newtonian physics. Newton was the man everyone wanted to be. Along came the economists. This is the quick version, but a couple of hundred years later the theory of neoclassical economics was formally established by a few men in England and France and then the United States, most notably Irving Fisher, and I cannot prove it but I am confident they all had Newton envy. They wanted to be the Newton of economics. Adam Smith's subject had been called political economy, and in the first act of this fragmentation they separated politics from economics, because politics is the messy part. With Newtonian physics you can run equations and build models that give answers.
I was astonished to find this page in Fisher's textbook. I cannot read the book, it is mostly math, but this page jumped off the screen. In his foundational text, still taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and anywhere else you can think of, he says we will take from mechanics, meaning Newtonian physics, and in this column a particle corresponds to an individual. Use the same equations, substitute a human being for a particle, and substitute disutility for work. In other words, the only reason I would ever work is to get money; otherwise I would rather sit lazily in my chair. That is literally the foundational math underneath neoclassical economics to this day. And in case you question whether the machine metaphor is real, here is the machine Irving Fisher built. This is the second iteration.
You are thinking, that was a long time ago, we must have gotten smarter. Ray Dalio, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the history of capitalism, has spent the last several years explaining the economy with a video called How the Economic Machine Works. I promise you this is how the mainstream thinks, and I can also promise you that nobody in my old world has stopped to think about whether it makes sense. It is a narrative we accept. When I started asking these questions it was not even sacrilege; it was, what happened to John, he used to be smart.
Fullerton · The next layer of the economic machine is modern finance, which I know a lot about. This picture is the best way I can communicate what finance is designed to do at a macro level. It is designed to optimize the risk-adjusted return on capital. What that means is it is designed to use natural capital and social capital, and I use those only as buckets, subject to not breaking laws most of the time and not violating regulations some of the time, to build this central mountain and draw the other two down as needed in order to optimize for the big mountain. So we live in a world with lots and lots of financial capital and degraded natural and social capital. The degraded natural capital includes reaching planetary boundaries and climate change, all symptoms of the algorithm. On the social side it is the grotesque and accelerating inequality, it is racism, all exacerbated by the impact of the finance algorithm.
The algorithm has also done all kinds of good things. It organized resources in a way that brought us the modern age. It is not that finance is bad or that those are bad people. The design was made for a different context. And we could debate politics, right or left, neoliberals or socialists, but all of them operate according to the same finance algorithm. So I would invite us not to get trapped in the divisiveness of left versus right, because both are wrong.
Punchline: we are lost. We are literally lost, because the maps we are using are bad maps, and the map is not the territory. Seeing is believing: show me the model, show me an example, build a company, prove it is possible. What Einstein meant, I think, is that while that is true, the opposite is also true. Believing is seeing. A theory is a belief system. It is not yet proven and not disproven. It is a story, and the story we tell ourselves determines what we are able to see. We told ourselves the sun rose in the east and therefore the Earth was the center of the universe for fifteen hundred years, because that was the story that made sense. The story that the economy is a machine to be optimized and controlled is the story we are telling ourselves now, and it needs to be unwound and replaced with a more accurate story of reality. The old story could work for a long time because the context was different. It was invented when there were probably not a billion people on the planet and the metabolism of the economy was trivial. The planet was the exact same size then, and it had much more life on it.
So we are in this shift, like the one between the medieval era and the modern one, and we do not yet have a name for what comes next. The metaphor is changing from a machine to an organism, or a network, or an ecosystem. I am very confident that is the next metaphor. A while ago I tried to figure out when people started calling it the modern era. My hypothesis is that people lived through the transition for generations before some historian said, we have entered the modern era. I think a future historian will point to the first quarter of this century, this new millennium. The bell rang with 9/11. That is a lot to sit with.
We will pause. If you need the bathroom, now is the chance to escape, and please come back. For those who stay, find a friend, the same person or a different one, and take a minute or two each: how does that story sit with you in the solar plexus? Not the brain. And if it does not sit with you at all, if this is all nonsense, say that too. Five minutes.
Fullerton · Anyone want to share, not just your own solar plexus but your sense of the room's?
From the room · A lot of dissonance. When you have the awareness and it shows up in your everyday relationships, you want to run through the streets with your hair on fire. Do you not see it? And then you find yourself in a room like this.
From the room · Deeply validated. We are the choir that showed up.
Fullerton · Ben made a good provocation at the end of the break. He said, this is if we get it right. I will push back a little, because these arrows are indeterminate about where they go, and one of the things I find hopeful about this story is that it does not matter. It matters for all kinds of reasons, but it does not change the story. If this is a light brush fire in the forest and we put it out, same story. If the forest burns down, same story. The forest will recover, and how does the forest recover? Through what is called the regenerative process. That is how life actually works. One thing I take comfort in, inside my anxiety, is that this project is bigger than my lifetime in all likelihood. There is a wonderful man named Andrea Illy, who makes good coffee if you are ever in Europe. He understands all this, and when he and I gave a talk together we were each asked to bring one photograph that explained our epiphany. He brought a photograph of a cathedral. We are building cathedrals we will probably never sit in. Whatever happens, we are building a cathedral. I have three kids I love dearly and I do not want bad things to happen to them, or to any of you, but in the long run the picture for me does not change. I have accepted that as much as anything. It is not that I like it, but it is how I get out of bed every day and keep doing what feels trivial against the scale of this.
Fullerton · I promised no solutions. I hope for a compass and some questions that form as I go, and I am not going to end with five questions; I want to disappoint you. For me the epiphany came standing on a ridge in Montana. Through my impact investing I got involved in holistic planned grazing, which is essentially mimicking how the buffalo used to roam. They roamed in dense herds because there were wolves, and a herd of buffalo is intimidating to a wolf where a lone buffalo is not. Because they moved in dense herds and they are big animals, they turned over the land and broke down any hardness in the soil, so that when it rained the rain did not run off. These are brittle grasslands and it does not rain much, but when it does, hard-packed ground sheds it and turned-over ground absorbs it like a sponge. Then they fertilized it, and they kept moving because they do not want to eat their own manure. The grass gets grazed and torn apart, but not down to the dirt, and then it rests and regenerates, the way you and I go to the gym, tear our muscles and rest. And because these are perennial grasses, most of the energy goes into the root system, which draws carbon down into the soil. The reason there are twelve feet of soil under Iowa, to put it in practical terms, is that Iowa was grazed this way for eons.
On that ridge we were working with people mimicking the process with domesticated cattle and electric fences to create the dense herding. Some of you are vegetarians and will be offended: the fight against eating meat should be a fight against the industrial meat system, not against cows, because cows are a tool we can use to replicate the natural system. The industrial system feeds the animals corn because they grow faster and fatter, so we replaced the prairies with corn, an annual that destroys the soil. I have seen a farm in Iowa that has grown corn next to a cemetery, and the cemetery is four feet higher than the cornfield. There are only twelve feet of soil, in one of the richest places on the planet. We are desertifying the planet because of our reductionist thinking: the cows are the problem, get the cows off the land. Too many animals of any kind is also a problem. It is a balance.
The people who did this, Allan Savory in particular, understood the interconnected relationships between the herbivores and the grass, the grass and the soil, the soil and the biodiversity and the water retention, instead of trying to optimize the production of meat. The epiphany for me was: what if we thought of the economy as a living system? How could we apply this holistic decision-making to manage the economy differently?
And the second thing: regeneration is the process. The word is becoming popular and you will hear it as an adjective in front of everything. Its real meaning is the process that describes how life actually works, which is a very real and very profound thing. We could spend the rest of our lives studying it and not understand it. Please participate in preserving that word as a special word. It does not mean an outcome. It means a process. If sustainability is the outcome we are looking for, regeneration is the process that will deliver it, so the key is to learn about that process. My definition of regenerative economics: the application of nature's patterns of systemic health, self-organization, self-renewal and regenerative vitality, that is a bit redundant and I need a better one, not just to economic systems but to socio-economic systems. The first thing we need to do is reconnect politics and economics, another myth of separation, because you cannot think of them apart, which means you cannot ignore power.
Fullerton · I want to dwell on reductionism and holism and mechanistic thinking. These are abstract words and I do not have a better way to communicate it. This goes back to Newton: break things too complicated to grasp into parts, so we can understand the parts, measure them, model how the system works and control it for what we desire. That is great for a machine. It is why a phone has evolved to look like a phone: we optimized the design, and nothing inside the phone changes. You plug it in and it works. The context of a living system is constantly changing: more rain or less, generational trauma, someone dropped a bomb on my house. The system has to adapt.
Wes Jackson, a plant geneticist with great wit, says there is nothing wrong with the reductionist method so long as we do not confuse the method with the way the world works. He is a reductionist scientist. The point is not that reductionist thinking is wrong. It is that we need to be clear about when we use it and when we do not. One simple way in is to distinguish things that are complicated from things that are complex. Machines are complicated. Why are all our smart people good at building machines, or at optimizing a single variable, like hedge fund managers? That is left-brain dominant thinking. What we are not good at is complexity, and we are not even good at recognizing one from the other. So the question, when we look at a problem: is this a complexity problem or a complicated problem? The default setting of our culture, accelerating because of what is happening in Silicon Valley, is confusion. The polycrisis creates all kinds of problems, so we think we have more problems to solve, so we use AI to solve them. AI is built on reductionism.
Fullerton · A quick lecture on regenerative economics. Premise one: the economy is a living system, not a machine. We could argue about how true that is, and I would now modify it and say the economy is a story, a language, but that language needs to be designed on living systems, because the economy is the interface between humanity and the biosphere we are embedded in, and it is made up of human beings, who are living systems. Everything is fractal. Premise two: there is a science of living systems, patterns and principles that describe how these things work, studied for a century. It is newer than physics, and we know a lot. That is a fact, not an assertion. Premise three: if the human economy is going to sustain itself and remain a living system rather than a dead one, someone needs to explain to me why it would be the only exception to the patterns every other living system follows. That gives us a compass radically different from neoclassical economics, from business school, and from politicians left or right, who have all accepted the story that the economy is a machine for us to manage and control.
One more point about managing and controlling, which I discovered recently. Irving Fisher was a eugenicist, a leader of the eugenics movement in the United States. He was a conservative, so maybe you are not shocked. Guess who else was a eugenicist. John Maynard Keynes. There goes your left-right finger pointing. Why do I raise it? I suspect there was a way to rationalize that thinking in that context; I do not accept it, but I assume these were not simply two bad men. What blinded them is that they accepted that not just the economy but society was a system to be controlled. Control is the common thread, and the complexity of life is literally not controllable. At the very foundation of the story we tell ourselves about economics is an idea about control and power, which a better historian than me could trace to patriarchy. This is a massive story to unravel.
Fullerton · I put forward eight principles, by no means the right answer, from my study and informal peer review with ecologists and biologists, looked at from the context of the whole economy rather than product design. To me they feel like first principles to guide us into a literal metamorphosis of the economy. I will not go through all eight. The single most important is being in right relationship. Those familiar with indigenous wisdom will recognize it. This entire living-systems paradigm is remarkably aligned not just with indigenous wisdom but with all the ancient wisdom traditions, which is a startling observation: we went full circle through mechanistic thinking, good for certain things but not the whole, to rediscover what our oldest traditions intuited. It is not that we go back to living in indigenous cultures. It is affirming that we all know this deep down. That is awe-inspiring. There is a T.S. Eliot line I will butcher: after all our exploring we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. That, to me, is the chill of this moment.
To show how hard it is to see, Gregory Bateson, a giant of this field and the father of my dear friend Nora Bateson, used to hold up his hand in talks to demonstrate the primacy of relationships. Yes, we need to be in right relationship, symbiotic, win-win. More importantly, relationships are primary and the parts are secondary. What do you see here?
From the room · A hand. A wedding band. Five fingers.
Fullerton · I lost that band and just found it; gold shrinks over time, apparently, and the jeweler lost it for three months. Everything you said is a part. They are all nouns. What makes a hand a hand? Four relationships. They are invisible until they are activated, and a hand is not a hand without them. The parts could look like all kinds of things and as long as the function works, it is a hand. We still call it five fingers. Learning to see what we all see in a new way is not a trivial project.
One more point, so you do not think this is all a tree-hugger thing. Empowered participation is another of the principles, and I learned it from an ecologist. In simple terms: my feet are empowered to participate in the circulation of oxygen in my body. That is good for my poor feet down there in the global south. It would be a shame if my feet died for lack of oxygen. It is also good for the rest of me, because feet that get oxygen participate in my whole health, which means I can walk and run. This shifts the conversation about inequality from an ethical or moral one to a systemic health requirement. Look at the consequences of disempowerment, and pick your own number. It is north of fifty percent in this country. I could make the case that we have disempowered ninety percent of humanity, and we wonder why the social system is sick. Not only because it is ethically atrocious, but because the whole system is not benefiting from the participation of all those parts. We disempowered the arts community by treating art as an elective in school, and we made it so hard to make a living as an artist, so we put art on museum walls as an artifact instead of part of the process of life. I hope empowered participation helps shift the political conversation from an ethical issue alone to our collective self-interest and survival. Imagine what that would do to a policy agenda.
Fullerton · I have a little book out there, and the QR code has the book and my work. I have a website, Capital Institute. I teach courses on regenerative economics and regenerative finance in a learning community called With Life, the idea being that we need to learn to do things in accordance with how life works. It is not a Capital Institute branded thing; it is a community learning together, approaching three thousand people from, I think, eighty-one countries, and we are about to launch a regenerative chamber of commerce to bring companies in as well. This is my art project, an artifact I hope continues long after I leave the planet. It is one of many.
People ask my theory of change. I have talked a lot about paradigms, and that comes directly from Donella Meadows, lead author of Limits to Growth, the woman I dedicated my book to even though I never got to meet her. She has an important paper called Places to Intervene in a System. The punchline is that all the leverage points matter, but the most important is the paradigm within which the system exists. I took that to heart and focused my work on the paradigm shift. Then she adds, as an afterthought, that the most important leverage point of all is the ability to let go of paradigms. So someday we will need to let this one go too.
If I look at what is unique about my contribution over 25 years, letting go of the old paradigm was a no-brainer for me, a spear in the chest, a self-evident truth that this could not continue. I have had many conversations with Wall Street people, and it turns out that letting go of a paradigm means letting go of your identity. That is a big deal. It is like an atheist convincing the pope to let go of Catholicism, particularly when the person is sixty or older and successful and their whole identity is built on it. Which means to me this is not going to be led by the sixty-year-olds. That is where you all come in. I am looking around: maybe a couple of us.
A final quote, because it is cool. Buckminster Fuller, the legendary architect and polymath, wrote a last book. Has anyone tried to read Fuller? It is hard. I gave up, and a friend who knew his work said, you have to read Grunch. Grunch of Giants, his critique of capitalism; it stands for something I forget, and it talks about capital markets. The critique is honestly not that great, but the beginning and the end are, and it is short. Nobody had told me Fuller used the word regeneration, so this felt like a huge validation. From the end of the book: nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow, and humankind will be a success. If you read the book you know what he also meant: if we do not, humankind will be in trouble. Thank you very much.
Ben · Statements and curiosities welcome, thirty seconds to a minute each. Your reflections interest us as much as your questions.
From the room: I have just heard about Mondragon. How does it relate to the regenerative?
Fullerton · Complicated answer. Mondragon is a network of co-ops in the Basque country in Spain. I have been to visit and spent time with some of them. It was envisioned by a young Catholic priest in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, when the country was destitute, who said: we need to create jobs, not just so people have a job, but because in Catholic belief our dignity is in our work, the opposite of the disutility I showed you earlier. Those cooperatives grew into a global business run as a co-op. Most people go study Mondragon and come away thinking co-ops are the answer. I come away saying they have built an ecosystem of businesses, they have built coherence between the businesses, they literally transfer profits between businesses to nurture the health of the whole. Theory determines what you are able to see. If you are looking for a solution to capitalism and you like co-ops, you see co-ops working and the answer is co-ops. They themselves would say it does not need to be a co-op to work. What they care about more than anything, including money, is their culture. The Basque language is older than Latin. It is a unique thing that is hard to replicate, so the answer is not co-ops everywhere, because what made it uniquely successful is the culture. I teach it in class. It is the best large-scale example I know of, not perfect by any means, and I literally learned at breakfast today that generational change is creating new tensions. It is messy.
From the room: I have been a fan of yours for a long time, and I was supposed to spend last week with Nora Bateson doing warm data. What hit my solar plexus was the Ray Dalio image, the momentum of the wrong story. Besides yourself, what hopeful forces, people or movements are spreading the right story that you recommend following or supporting?
Fullerton · It is tricky. Within economics there is the ecological economics profession, fifty years old, Herman Daly and his followers. Daly died before it had its real moment. Think about it: he worked for the World Bank, then taught at universities for an entire career, died in his eighties, and they never let him teach in an economics department. Now ecological economics and the doughnut economics framework are having a moment, and there is all this talk, particularly in Europe, of degrowth and post-growth. That is all brilliant and essential as the first step. My work began when I had studied with the people who created that discipline and concluded that if this is all there is, I am really depressed. So I went searching for something more. We used to call it the unfinished business of ecological economics. The word regenerative is being used more and more. It is very real in agriculture, incredibly hopeful. It is very real in the built environment; the work of the Regenesis group is brilliant, and Bill Reed is one of my important teachers. We are still struggling to get this into economics. People have been trained in reductionist, mechanistic thinking and it is second nature, so even my friends in ecological economics struggle to see what I am trying to say, and I struggle to communicate what I think I see, because the juice in this is potential. You manifest potential; you cannot see it in advance. That starts to feel like a faith thing to someone trained in scientific materialism.
Let me throw out an example I just discovered that proves this is not only real but massive and hidden in plain sight. I write something fairly deep every month now on Substack, beyond the book. Something got me thinking about Jeff Bezos, and he does control my book, since something like eighty percent of book sales run through Amazon, which is why you have to write a review. I was interested in his thinking about space, which sent me down a rabbit hole, and I wondered about the story of AWS. First, Amazon was unprofitable at an accelerating rate from its founding in 1994 until about 2000, losing more every year than the year before. I am old enough to remember thinking it was ridiculous. It broke even one quarter in 2001 or 2002. It was already a public company, which is unusual and only happened because of the dot-com era, or it never would have made it out of being private. Right when they were getting their head above water they had a massive systems integration problem. They had grown from domestic books to international books to beyond books, with all the SKUs and warehouses and systems trying to talk to each other through different interfaces. There must have been a panic meeting, and what came out of it was a mandate, from Bezos it seems, that all these systems communicate through a single API. They did it out of desperation for survival and a search for efficiency. Then, as an afterthought, two engineers wrote a post-mortem memo, and almost as an appendix said: we are probably not the only company with this problem, maybe there is a business in it. Bezos saw the afterthought and asked for another memo. Cloud computing was born. AWS today, according to Wall Street, is worth the entire market cap of Amazon. The entire e-commerce business, with all its extraction and everything it did to get us addicted to on-demand everything, is a rounding error.
Why tell that story here? A year ago a group of us spent three days together and the consensus that emerged was: we need to build coherence.
From the room · That gathering became a nonprofit and a regenerative economic summit, and John was one of our guests, with about thirty people who are in many ways the future of this movement. Coherence is still happening, and we have gone further: people need accompaniment and resourcing so the coherence becomes minimum viable experiments in a regenerative civilization. The perfect complement to John's book is Jeremy Lent's on ecocivilization. In John's final thirty pages and throughout Jeremy's book there are concrete, practical things that should be tried and are not being tried. I am now looking for places where you can go and inhabit these experiments, and I hope Ben has more and more of them in New York.
Fullerton · Living systems evolve to higher levels of coherence in order to keep developing, and in that process they learn to do more with less. A rainforest is not a big wheat field. The wheat field grows by doing more with more, then runs out of steam and evolves, which ecology calls succession, into a grassland, and with enough rain into a forest, where the coherence underground is beyond our imagination. There is very little coherence in a bed of weeds. What did Amazon do? They built coherence, digital coherence, not to create a new industry but almost by accident, to solve an existing problem. They created the conditions for coherence to be possible, and out of that emerged an entire industry, now driving the AI industry, and a business worth the whole company. Plenty is wrong with Amazon. My Substack piece hypothesizes that Bezos does not even see this, because his mantra is dynamism or decay, an on-off switch, whereas in living systems it is vitality and development. He took the genius idea of coherent systems talking to each other and put it back on the growth track, back into the wheat field. The reason I tell it is that here is regenerative potential hidden inside Amazon, which had no business being possible, because Amazon should have gone bankrupt five years earlier, and without the bubble maybe we would not have cloud computing. The message, and this is where our artistic creativity comes in: we need to learn how to create the conditions for coherence to coagulate, and good things will come out. That is the premise of the regenerative paradigm. Ben will email the slides.
From the room: My question is about the people who will struggle with this shift. How do you manage when you encounter fear or resistance?
Fullerton · Fear is very real, and it is not just fear of dying or fear of losing money. It is identity. Who am I? What is my purpose here? I thought the game was compete and win and be the hero and write the big check at the benefit dinner. Honestly, I do not have a formula that works. I have chosen not to try to convince people, but to let the universe attract to the work the people who are hungry to hear it, so they do not have to be sold. Something brought you all here, which means you are an easy sell. Quick story: an old banker friend I had not spoken to in easily a decade sent me an email out of the blue. Oh my God, I just read your book, we have to get together. I would never have bothered trying with this guy. He is still playing golf and doing deals. Something changed in him, not me, and not anything I wrote down. He is suddenly hungry for it. Which gets to another thing: if you study systems science you learn that the only way systems change is in response to pressure, and the pressure is up. Put enough heat under a pot of water and it boils. So the biggest thing working in our favor is the worse it gets. Which is interesting. It is a lot easier than me convincing the CEO of JPMorgan that his religion is wrong.
From the room: I do this work around regenerative food systems, and what we have noticed, from the idea that we are not separate, is that in order to disrupt someone we have to love them and really understand where they are coming from. Until we can get into someone else's shoes it is hard to disrupt, and convincing comes from a power-over place. How do we love the chemical company in the food system, or at least understand where it is coming from?
Fullerton · I love that. David Bohm, the physicist, is one of the big thinkers foundational to this. He wrote Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which I will not try to explain, and a short essay collected in a book called On Dialogue. He points out the distinction between dialogue and discussion, let alone debate. Discussion comes from the same root as percussion. Debate is me trying to convince you, power over you. The dia in dialogue means through, not two. Dialogue is not two people; it is logos, new understanding through conversation. Which relates to your loving. Literally listen. The oil and gas executive doing what he or she is doing has their own story, and if you attack them, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Back to mechanics. Love is an interesting word. I am starting to get more comfortable using it, but it is hard to use in front of most crowds. Thanks for bringing it in.
From the room: I come from Carol Sanford's lineage of this work, and we look at capability development at the system level, and at nodal interventions: where is the acupuncture point that would shift a belief system? From where you sit in economics, what are the capabilities to develop, and are you seeing any intervention points?
Fullerton · Carol was one of all of our teachers, and I found her hard to understand; I am not the only one. Bill Reed is a colleague of hers. I am not sure what the analog is. What feels foundational to me is to learn what regeneration means, what the process means, which is why I am so passionate about first principles and patterns. Every snowflake is unique, but every snowflake looks like a snowflake. We can learn to see the patterns of a snowflake rather than the specifics, and then apply them across contexts. The regenerative economy in Brazil will look different from the Hudson Valley, and different again in Japan. I always hesitate to throw out five examples, including Mondragon, because then everyone says, I have to build a Mondragon in Kentucky. The developmental piece is to understand the principles, and the only way to understand them is to work with them and notice, the way I noticed this Amazon thing last week after twenty years of thinking about it and hating Amazon.
In terms of nodal interventions, this is my curse in life, but it is finance. One of my teachers is a brilliant woman named Jude Currivan. I once teased her: what do you do on a Friday night, read peer-reviewed research? She admitted that is what she does. She is a cosmologist, and in our collaboration she developed the idea that if the metaphor we are searching for is metamorphosis, then we are a fat, overstuffed caterpillar that is not very nice to the other caterpillars, out of food and out of expansion capacity, and we need to figure out how to be a butterfly. I think that is not only an accurate metaphor but more literally what is happening, including that things need to die for new things to be born. She explained that when a caterpillar goes into the chrysalis, one of the first things to die is the immune system. What is an immune system for? We think it keeps us healthy, and that is sort of true if you are healthy. What it is actually for is to keep you in your current form, to keep the system in its current form. So I do not see any way for the regenerative economy to emerge at scale without the finance algorithm at least degrading, if not dissolving. And I feel like my curse for working on Wall Street for twenty years is figuring out how to do that.
Ben · We could go on forever, and John has a packed schedule, so let us let him go to the front for the book signing and give everyone mingling time. Real quick, before chatting: John will be at the front with the books, first come first served, and there are sixteen left. Ben will email the deck when life returns to normal. If you have a seltzer, take it with you, and any dishes can come to the front. Everyone here is clearly interested in the same topic, so take the time to get to know one another. You are welcome to stay as long as you want. The signs at the front list every event we are hosting this week. The restaurant and café are open the whole time, and if you have feedback about the space, too hot, too cool, too busy, tell us, because that is how we do better for the rest of the week.