Rachel Cook, founder of Seeds, is the architect of a new economy. The way Rachel sees it, there’s more than enough money in the world to meet every human being’s needs. But in our current monetary system, the flow of that money is carefully controlled by gatekeepers like banks and investors. Using the power of cryptocurrency, Rachel’s opening new pathways for giving, allowing wealth to flow more easily from person to person. Once the barriers blocking access to wealth are broken down, suddenly anything seems possible.
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Who’s responsible for our happiness? For most people, finding happiness–true happiness–is a personal journey. But what if the government took on some of that responsibility? In this episode, we speak with Dasho Karma Ura, President of the Center for Bhutan Studies on Gross National Happiness. We ask about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, key findings, and what we can do to bring us all more happiness.
Jean-François Noubel calls himself an ‘open source earthling’. Though he lives in France, he considers his true home to be within himself. Like a turtle. And though he lives within a market economy, he chooses to live as much as he can in a gift economy instead, without money. But why? As a researcher of collective intelligence, Jean-Francois sees currency as the tool that informs the design of human society. He believes we have to expand our concept of wealth and redesign the currencies that connect us to create economics systems that are fair, civil, and transparent.
Chuck Collins, a program director at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-editor of inequality.org, shares the story of waking up to his own privilege and the racist systems that granted his family generational wealth while stripping it from others. Since that discovery, Chuck has dedicated his life to spreading awareness about wealth inequality and working toward a more equitable economic system. If we’re going to mend the damage done by the ‘extraction economy’, we must first tell the true story of how we got to where we are.
Does more money lead to greater happiness? In Rivera Sun’s novel, Billionaire Buddha, inspired by the life of Dariel Garner, true happiness doesn’t come until immense wealth is given away. In our 20th episode, Mel and Steff chat with Rivera and Dariel about income inequality, the immense damage being done to people and planet in the name of wealth accumulation, and the importance of reexamining our values to build a more collaborative and equitable future.
