An Economic Love for Humanity with Paddy LeFlufy
Building Tomorrow, a new economics via new organizational technologies. With Paddy LeFlufy. Paddy and Andrea delve into the transformative potential of new economic models in reshaping society towards sustainability and equity. Featuring insights from Paddy LeFlufy and his book Building Tomorrow, who shares his journey from mathematics to global exploration, it highlights the urgency of moving away from profit-centric practices to those that nurture humanity and the planet.
The discussion covers groundbreaking ideas like the 'Future Guardian' and 'donut economy' models, emphasizing the role of love in motivating systemic change and the importance of constructing organizations and systems that truly embody care for the environment and societal well-being. Through a blend of philosophical perspectives and practical solutions, this video presents a compelling case for reimagining traditional economic paradigms and adopting regenerative, love-driven approaches for a balanced and inclusive future.
#love #philosophy #paddyleflufy #economy #andreahiott #buildingtomorrow
00:00 Clip Exploring the Essence of Love and Its Impact
00:50 Introduction to Paddy LeFlufy: A Journey of Love and Humanity
01:49 Diving Deep into 'Building Tomorrow': A Revolutionary Approach to Economics
03:52 Paddy's Personal Journey: From Mathematics to Global Adventures
06:11 Awakening to Ecological Realities and the Power of Change
26:36 The Circular Economy and Future Guardian Model: Pioneering Sustainable Business Practices
37:50 Redefining Profit and Stakeholder Alignment
38:29 The Circular Economy and Sustainable Business Models
39:33 Challenges and Changes in Corporate Structures
40:24 The Future Guardian Model: A New Paradigm
41:00 Patagonia: A Case Study in Corporate Transformation
41:49 Momentum and Social Pressure for Change
42:48 Alternative Models: B Labs and B Corporations
45:06 Regenerative Organizations and Global Networks
46:29 Towards a New Economic System: Incremental and Holistic Changes
49:55 Understanding Money Creation and Its Impact
54:14 Practical Steps Towards Positive Change
59:34 Personal Journeys and the Power of Individual Action
01:06:29 Love, Philosophy, and Systemic Change
Find Paddy's book, which was a 2023 Financial Times Best Book of the Year, here: https://paddyleflufy.com/buy-the-book/
Sign up for Paddy's Substack from his website: https://paddyleflufy.com/
Doughnut Economics Action Lab https://doughnuteconomics.org/
B Corp and B Labs: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/
Future Guardians on Love & Philosophy
Transcript:
How to Transform the System(s) with Love
Paddy LeFlufy: [00:00:00] Love can mean many different things, but so my kind of working definition of it is, um, wanting that which is best for. And the emotional feeling of love, the kind of fuzzy feeling, as it were, I suppose is a kind of natural mechanism to cause us to to love in the sense of want that which is best for, the object of our feeling.
So it's a kind of creating love, Feeling. And then so to connect based on that definition, to connect it to my life and work. So this does sound a little bit kind of grandiose or whatever, but, in looking at it in from this perspective, I feel like my writing is motivated by my love of humanity as a whole,
um, and I suppose the travel period, that time when I was going and meeting humanity essentially, um, could be seen as the time in which I fell in love with humanity. but I'm not sure whether that's a reasonable way of putting it.
[00:01:00] Hi, Paddy. Thanks for being here today. Welcome to Love and Philosophy.
Paddy LeFlufy: Hello. Thanks very much for having me.
Andrea Hiott: And your name is Patty Laflouffe. Do I say it right? Laflouffe. Laflouffe. Sorry. Where does that come from? It's quite a name, both combined.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, it actually comes from the Lebanon.
A distant relation of mine, in the 1850s or something, went to the Lebanon and
Andrea Hiott: married someone from the Lebanon.
Paddy LeFlufy: What's the paddy from? Well, paddy's from Ireland, it was an Irish lady who went to the Lebanon in the 1850s and then married, Had some kids and returned to Ireland.
Okay,
Andrea Hiott: so you already have a lot of movement going on in your history, which is interesting for your book. So this book is just great. I really hope everyone will read it because, it's one of the first books I've seen that really, puts a lot of things that have already been out there together [00:02:00] into one place and also explains it in a way that's easy to understand but also very deep. It's called Building Tomorrow and you can expand on this but the basic idea from my point of view is you're showing how There are other options for how to think about our economics, our business models, if we made some changes, which aren't that hard, but are definitely challenges, um, we could get closer to a healthier relationship between humanity and the planet and start to really work on some of these planetary problems like climate change that just can seem so depressing at the moment. But maybe you give me your summary of the book first, and then we'll get into how you ended up writing it.
Paddy LeFlufy: Cool. Yeah. So I suppose that's, that was quite a good summary. The idea of the book is that we need to Drastically transform society in many ways.
And one of those ways is to transform the economic system, in order to [00:03:00] avoid environmental catastrophe. And, um, also that there are small groups of people doing very pioneering innovations that redesign specific areas of the economic system, such as how businesses are defined and the societal goal, economic goal and there are six organizational technologies in the book. So if we do them with all of them, then by the end of the book, I show how this would transform the system into a completely different system that's much better for for people around the world.
Andrea Hiott: We're going to talk about all six of those. before we really get into the book itself, how what's your history? How did how did you end up writing in this book a, almost like a guidebook for a new economic system?
Did you study economics? I think you worked in London in economics, but just give us a little brief idea of what happened that you came to focus on economics and the need for a change.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So, I've got a slightly unusual background, I'll just kind of go through it quite quickly. So I actually, studied maths at university at Cambridge. And that [00:04:00] was basically because I was really good at maths at school and it just seemed like a sensible thing to do
and then, while I was growing up and and at university, I used to, I went on a lot of adventures traveling in different places around the world. I would, you know, work in factories and then go off and go sailing and
Andrea Hiott: you just wanted to see other things or what, what was the motivation?
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. I just loved it. Basically. I just knew. Big world out there. And it was really exciting and much more exciting than the life I'd grown up in, which was fine and lovely and everything, but
so were you kind of
Andrea Hiott: restless? Were you looking for? Yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: I was exactly. I just had that thing inside me. So then after uni, I, spent a year in Spain learning Spanish, and then I became an accountant at KPMG in London, but well, there were kind of a dual reason for doing it. One was that if I decided to do, a kind of career in London or in business or that kind of stuff, then, it would be really useful for that. And it was a really good basis for learning about that and experiencing, living in that [00:05:00] kind of world. But also having qualified, and this is what I actually did. Having qualified, I, could get short term six month contracts that paid very well, then I could basically just go to London, get a six month, work for six months, earn a load of money, and then go off and have adventures
Andrea Hiott: work a lot, make a bunch of money in London with your math skills, and then go explore the world. Exactly. That must have been quite a contrast though, to be in London and this economic world and then
Paddy LeFlufy: yes, it definitely was. Yeah, no, actually, I remember one time , the first time I was away, I went, I was in Africa for quite a while and, I spent some time with the Hadza hunter gatherers, um, in Tanzania. Hunter gathering on the, on the savannahs of Africa kind of thing. And then like two or three months later, I was working at Accenture as a finance specialist.
So yeah, there were times when I would sit there at my computer. Thinking, Hmm, I wonder what my mates, Cancun and Maragumba are up to right now,
Andrea Hiott: amazing to have those different spaces in your head. So you were restless, you were exploring, but you also had this kind of natural ability for math.
You understood that in a way that didn't take a whole lot of effort, [00:06:00] but then you also saw all these, all these contrasts. You remember any particular moment, like in all these travels where you.
where you started to wake up to the ecological
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, so I suppose in the ecological, ecological sense, so this was I was doing this in the early 2010s kind of time. So it was before, it was when we all obviously knew about climate change, but it was before there were, you know, just massive disasters on the news all the
Andrea Hiott: time.
Paddy LeFlufy: It was still something that was mainly in the future from the perspective of Westerners who weren't very closely aligned, closely in contact with nature. Um, but around the world in various places, um, both in Africa, and I spent a couple of years in the Amazon jungle after that, uh, people in these places did say that they had noticed, the weather was changing, things were less predictable, the rains were less predictable, um, and so on and so forth. So in that sense, it was clear that it was a problem.
Andrea Hiott: And you were closer to where it was I guess even more when, [00:07:00] when the change happens, it's even more urgent, in those places.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. Because they, when you're just living a subsistence kind of lifestyle, then, it really matters if the rains don't come and your crops don't grow. In the West, there's there's a lot of, a much bigger buffer. But then, to just very quickly go back to another strand, of early life and thinking as it were, before I went traveling, including from when I became an adult essentially, was that I've always felt and seen that this is essentially like a phase the way that society is at the moment is just a phase. We do have the opportunity looking at things over the long term, humanity has the opportunity to make heaven on earth, not in a religious sense, but , just to make the world an amazing place for everyone.
Andrea Hiott: , the power is there if we
Paddy LeFlufy: exactly the, exactly the power
Andrea Hiott: is the responsibility to use
Paddy LeFlufy: it that way.
Exactly and so, initially that was just in a kind of very vague kind of way. And then as I was learning more about the world. I was putting more pieces [00:08:00] together, not necessarily consciously thinking like that, but just generally.
Andrea Hiott: You already had this idea that, Oh, this is, we're in a phase.
It could change. This is the way history works. , and there's potential for making it better. Not only that we destroy the world.
Paddy LeFlufy: I see. Yeah, exactly. And in a way, it kind of, kind of felt slightly outside of other cultures as well. So for example, to me, although I grew up with very similar people to that, working in as a finance specialist at Accenture, felt almost as much going into another culture as going to the Hadza or something like that was
Andrea Hiott: kind of cultivating.
this outsider view of things, this observational. view
Paddy LeFlufy: Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, there was this very positive, like we can do much better than this kind of thing and we just need to work out how to, and then in terms of. Not so much ecological, but, um, personal, like for people kind of thing. There was a moment in the Amazon and this kind of typifies, [00:09:00] uh, as opposed to being the moment when I realized it, but it typifies my general thinking over the time.
Okay. So I spent a year, Well, eight months, uh, learning from a indigenous wisdom keeping formerly taught by an indigenous wisdom keeper in the Amazon, and he was, Both a proper wisdom keeper and a very good and wise person in the kind of universal sense. He was just a really good guy. Yeah. And one evening, um, we were just chatting that evening and he said to me.
Paddy, what good news is there for the poor people of the world? Um, very definitely. He was one of the poor people of the world. Their society was very poor. Um, and, what a
Andrea Hiott: question, Paddy, what good news? Is there for the poor people of the world?
Paddy LeFlufy: That's quite a question. And so, what I said to him was I said, well, I knew about a few things, right? I'd worked in this charity in Africa that was doing really good for some about 25, 000 poor people there, for example. But they were just Things dotted around here and there, if you're asking about the poor people of the [00:10:00] world, that's a very big question. So I gave him the example of, well, if we, and the society he was in had a lot of really serious problems due to all sorts of culture clashes and things. And I said to him, look, if we sorted out this whole river basin and made things much better for essentially everyone in you. That would be awesome.
Right. And he was like, yeah, of course it would. And I said, yeah, but there's only 5, 000 people who live in this river basin and there are thousands of millions of poor people in the world. So the only way that can really be good news for the poor people of the world as a whole is if it is by changing the system.
The only way we can improve things for everyone is by changing the system.
Andrea Hiott: Was that a revelation for you when you heard yourself say it? Well, yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: It crystallized it. Yeah. It kind of crystallized it. Exactly. So , it kind of typifies the general process I was going through at the time.
So this is
Andrea Hiott: interesting because the systems, so You're writing about economic systems,
Paddy LeFlufy: um, right. So there are different, they use very different [00:11:00] kind of systems, local systems, as it were in the jungle and in among the Hadza and where the charity was and what have you, they each had their own kind of local system, but they're also, even the Hadza, the Hadza less so, but all of them were connected to some extent to the global economic system. So for example, the, so an economic system is the entire system by which society organizes the production and distribution of goods and services. So it's not just about money. It's about things and services and I can give examples for each of them actually. Uh I was at this charity in Northern Mozambique for a few months. That's a very poor area. And they're poor fishermen kind of thing, and one of the things that they, made the most money out of actually when they went fishing were these weird, I think they were sea cucumbers.
They were really weird. They were kind of hard they didn't look edible or anything, right? Yeah. But. They would sell them on the beach to these guys who came from the local town and apparently like what they explained was they got loads of money for them [00:12:00] relative to The other things they got, how much they would get for other things.
And they explained that, the reason was that they were a delicacy in China and there was some insane, like ridiculously complicated, supply chain that got them from these poor guys in, on the beach in Mozambique all the way around and then in the jungle. Um, for indigenous people, axes and machetes are incredibly useful and, um, actually the axes did come from Brazil. I was in Peru and they only came from Brazil, so not all the way around the world. But a lot of the goods like Welly boots and just all of that kind of stuff. They would buy from shops, run by generally speaking, run by Chinese people lots of Chinese goods. So again, that's where they're essentially to, to an extent reliant on the global economic system. And even with the axes and machetes, although they're from Brazil, they're still produced and you know, Distributed, distributed in the, using the systems, the kind of global systems
Andrea Hiott: that shows us how it's all interconnected, I guess also I'd like to know , so I'm thinking like the growth paradigm and [00:13:00] profit and these things that you talk about in the book, like that, would that be kind of the mindset of these people who are creating the goods that they're buying, be it in China, be it in the U. S., be it in Europe, are those the systems that are framing all of this that you're talking about?
Right.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So in terms of the individual's mindsets, Even if individuals don't particularly agree with the system of economic growth or, profit maximization and that kind of thing. So individuals who are say running a family business or have a, an individual shop or a zero waste shop in Bristol or whatever it might be, they can then, Run that in, uh, as, uh, kind of functions in more or less whatever way they want, right within the bounds of the regulations and laws and things. But if you're working in a company, then you kind of have to go with the company system, the company rules.
So profit maximization in that case. Right. So this is actually, one of my, one of [00:14:00] the, organizational technologies in my book, uh, is the Future Guardian model of governance, which redefines What a business is. So businesses at the moment are defined by the, there's something called the articles of association, which is kind of like the constitution and the way that that's written combined with the law essentially defines businesses as being profit maximizing, like their legal duty is to maximize their profits.
Andrea Hiott: The future guardians , I'm fascinated by it and I want to spend some time on it, but just for people who haven't thought much about these issues yet, what is this idea of the growth mindset? And what is this idea of profit motive that, that does structure most companies and their articles
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. So, essentially economic growth. Or the growth paradigm. Sorry. Yeah. That.
Yeah. So yeah, cause this is specifically to do with economics. So basically economic growth for the last century plus kind of 150 odd years, has been the kind of main Dynamic and aim got [00:15:00] a goal of kind of the economic system.
Basically our current economic system is built around economic growth.
Andrea Hiott: So you have to grow if you're going to be
Paddy LeFlufy: successful. It's become that you have to grow. Started being that, well, look, as there is, when there is economic growth, that kind of reflects the fact that people have more things and there's more exchange going on and it just improves quality of life.
Right. Which was essentially true at first. Not a bad thing. Um, yeah, there were a lot of externalities hitting remote people in other cultures as, because it, one way of growing is essentially like expanding into other areas and taking things from other areas, extracting from other areas. So it did have a lot of, Very serious externalities in that kind of sense.
But from the perspective of the West where it was happening, it looked like basically just a good thing, right?
Andrea Hiott: The stock market is built on this, right? Every, you must always get more and more. It's, we almost just assume that is the success paradigm
Paddy LeFlufy: when things get better, things are growing kind of thing. And then it [00:16:00] was like, well, economic growth became a proxy for improvement in human welfare. So people could just say, look, if the economy is growing, then things are getting better, essentially. Well said.
Um, and, but it was only a proxy. It's not actually saying necessarily that things are getting better. And then as time's gone on, and particularly in the kind of, from the late 20th century early 21st century kind of time, and in fact, in the period from the 1950s, which is kind of known as the golden age of capitalism, when there's loads of.
economic growth and things were genuinely getting better. It's also known as the great acceleration because loads of, uh, metrics went up exponentially, including economic growth, but also environmental destruction and loads of good things and loads of
Andrea Hiott: bad things, quality of life and all of these kinds of markers.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. Food production, all of that, but also say fertilizer and pesticide use in the way it was, destroying biodiversity. Went exponentially worse kind of thing. So by the kind of end of the 20th [00:17:00] century, the externalities side of it was getting just absolutely massive, right?
And it's kind of very debatable indeed, whether growth in the West particularly has had much positive effect, right? And even in poor countries, growth generally does or. Making things better, right? For places like in Mozambique, where there's basically just hardly anything at all, improving people's material quality of life does involve economic growth because it involves having more stuff and being able to do more things.
Right. But that doesn't mean that aiming for growth is necessarily the way to get that thing because growth is very biased towards rich people it kind of skews things so that you can improve, if you just improve things for rich people, then that increases economic growth
Andrea Hiott: so a lot of people just, just get ignored and it's not. Yeah, exactly. So it just means what matters for the growth, so to speak. Exactly. So if I'm going to caricature it, just for the sake of, time a lot of businesses are structured in this way [00:18:00] towards growing more and more and more.
And there's also starting in the 50s, this idea that you buy more and more and more. This just seems like the way the world works, that economics just works that way. I don't think many people think of there being an alternative necessarily. You are going to tell us some alternatives, but, it's not that growth is bad, it's a good thing, but it's that it's become an assumption for an economic model that is kind of blind to what it means so that it means it's not even growth.
Sometimes the word growth seems like the wrong word. It's more like more stuff, more money. At any cost almost, without much contemplation, if that's the right way. And if there's another way, is that fair to say?
Paddy LeFlufy: Yes, that is fair to say.
Andrea Hiott: And then, so you start to discuss these six technologies and, the first two are kind of new, different frameworks for that, right? you talk about the Doughnut model and also this idea of the circular economy.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, so, yeah, so as you say, those are the two, the first two organizational technologies in my book and they're kind [00:19:00] of, yeah, frameworks because they're about reshaping the overall economy. And then, cause then the next two are about businesses and then about the financial monetary systems.
Andrea Hiott: Organizational technology, that's the term you use
Paddy LeFlufy: organizational technologies? Yeah. So what I, I define that as the processes and institutions and systems that we use to organize society. And, so the doughnut kind of specifically approaches the growth paradigm, replaces it essentially in the aspect of, growth as, a kind of political or societal economic goal. So basically with the economic growth has become. Um, it's become necessary and for society because of the way the systems run. When you don't have growth, you go into a recession.
Andrea Hiott: It's the way we choose our politicians and so on
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. And so for politicians, politicians have to come up with like a positive thing and be like, look, this is the good we're going to do right in order to get into power and to. Hopefully do good kind of [00:20:00] thing. So basically at the moment, for lack of other options of that they know about, and they kind of can talk about properly they. Always want growth to be there, right? They always want to talk about growth. And so what we need to in order to be able to get away from that for on that kind of societal goal, we need a positive replacement. And that's what the donut development paradigm is. So the donut was invented by Kate Raworth in 2011. And She's also spearheading an organization, the donut economics action lab, that's doing really amazing work to, help build a movement of people.
Andrea Hiott: It's often called deal, right? D E A L. Deal. Yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: exactly. Donut economics action lab deal. Um, and yeah, they're doing really great work. And so what the donut is, well, in a sentence, it replaces the goal of economic growth with a new goal of meeting the needs of all within the means of the living planet. So it's saying we need to make sure everyone has enough of life's basics, such as food, [00:21:00] education, social networks, et cetera
collectively, we need to not overshoot the planetary boundaries, of causing climate change, biodiversity loss, messing with nutrient cycles, et cetera. And both of the two, so it's called the donut because this can be drawn as two concentric rings. So the inside ring is, um, the social foundation. So you need to be above all of the social foundation things.
And then the outside ring is the planetary boundaries. So you need to be inside that. So the goal becomes getting inside the donut it
Andrea Hiott: gives us a really potent visualization of where we could try and aim for. And growth can be part of it, but it's not the goal. It's not the domineering, overarching, everything towards growth.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yes, exactly. Like Kate Raworth talks about, um, becoming growth agnostic, like really we want to not have, we want it to not matter whether or not we're growing or not. We want it to matter whether or not we're improving things.
Andrea Hiott: That's really good.
Meeting the needs of all within the means of the living planet. That's a really, [00:22:00] it seems so basic, but it's another one of those things that hasn't been stated as a goal
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah, exactly. It's, well, it has now. It
Andrea Hiott: has been. Now it has. But before this, before 2011
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah, exactly.
No, it's a really good, kind of conceptual system because it's got a, yeah, a clear articulation in a sentence. It's got this great visualization and all of the bounds are specified very clearly. So the outside bounds are they use the, the planetary boundaries from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which are reasonably famous in the People are interested in this kind of thing, at least where they've worked out a set of nine, I think it is, kind of areas like climate change, et cetera. And the bounds, they've worked out the bounds for almost all of them now, and they've actually worked out that globally, we've overshot the bounds on six of them already. So, we really need to turn things around quite drastically. And then the The inside ring of the social foundation, um, they've kind of got specific things with numerical, levels of what needs to be got to, and it's not exactly the same as, but it's [00:23:00] based on the sustainable development goals, that's a massive thing done by the UNESCO. So yeah, so it's both got this clear articulation. It's, it's easy to kind of see as an overall concept and it's got very specific numerical amounts to it. So it can't be kind of greenwashed. Insofar as so for example, and this is another great way of doing it, but there's a, so there's the wellbeing economy is another kind of like idea for this kind of stuff.
And there is the Wellbeing economy alliance is doing great work and , but as a concept wellbeing is like, it can be defined in different ways. I've seen it defined in loads of different ways by different people. And therefore it. It's a bit too wishy washy. People
Andrea Hiott: claiming that
Paddy LeFlufy: they're a well being thing when they're not kind of thing, whereas you can't claim you're inside the donut when you're not, unless you mess with the numbers, because.
of this, that clarity that
Andrea Hiott: it's got. Yeah. And one thing you show very well in the book, when you're describing this is how it can reorient what we think of as, how an economy should grow. So right now, it seems like developing countries have to go through certain [00:24:00] kind of levels of pollution and waste and all of this in order to develop.
But as you show, and as the model makes clear, a developed country in this Paradigm is a different sort of thing. In fact, nobody's really a developed country, are they? Because no one's actually in the middle of the doughnut.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. So there's a really great graph that, there's a team at Leeds called the good, they have a, well, they have a, a kind of project called the good life project or something like that and they've, where they're working out where, you All different countries are, and now they're going into lots of specific details about it, of movement and what have you, in the donut paradigm. And they draw it, quite a visual thing,
and the kind of conclusion of, of the analysis, which is, can be shown really clearly on a graph, is that no one is developed, no countries are developed.
So there's kind of three groupings of countries. Developed in the rich countries and, developed in the economic growth sense, countries who do provide the social foundation for all of their people, approximately almost all of the social foundations. But, but [00:25:00] they're also overgoing all of the, planetary boundaries and then there are poor countries that aren't overdoing the planetary boundaries because they don't have much effect, but they also don't have the social foundation for their populations and then middle income countries are generally both going over the planetary boundaries and not providing for their populations because that's the way round it goes. Like it's improved for some people, but not all people. And therefore the social foundation isn't that kind of thing. So that means that each of those three groups to get into the doughnut, which is providing both and no country in the world is doing this. The closest at the moment is Costa Rica. They're pretty close to it, but they're the only one. And so each needs to go in a different direction, essentially, like the Developed in the Western sense, in the economic growth sense, countries need to, continue to provide the social foundation while getting within the planetary boundaries, whereas poor countries, need to stay within the planetary boundaries, but provide a social foundation. So those are two completely different goals and [00:26:00] therefore different routes into the
Andrea Hiott: doughnut. And this shows when you shift away from that assumed growth mindset that we were talking, or growth paradigm that we were talking about, a lot of different possible trajectories open up.
So these assumptions we were making, as you show in the book, about how a country has to develop can be done differently, which actually, as you show too, it becomes very optimistic and hopeful about what we could possibly do it offers a visualization, a different way of thinking about what we want as countries and what our goals can be and how we can get to them. A different landscape and a different map. And what about the next you move into this technology of the circular economy
Paddy LeFlufy: so the circular economy is specifically about material flows. The kind of, uh, simplest definition of it is that the circular economy solves the waste problem by redesigning how materials flow through the economy, so that they cycle endlessly around the economy and never become unusable waste. So essentially at the moment, there is quite a bit of circular economy [00:27:00] happening. It's happening more and more. It's been going on it's been increasing more and more over the 21st century. There's loads of companies and organizations doing circular economy things, but the traditional kind of economy was a linear economy of essentially you take raw materials, dig your oil, uh, grow your cotton, whatever it is, turn them into products, use the products, the products break, or, you know, get old, whatever. And then, you throw them away. So it's linear in a kind of schematically that's going from raw material, use, bin. Landfill, and so obviously recycling is kind of helping with
Andrea Hiott: making it something more sustainable.
Recycling is almost like a toy version.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. It's like a, not good enough version essentially.
Andrea Hiott: But it's it's something that now is at least common, whereas it wasn't maybe 30 years ago. And that is part of the circular. It's an
Paddy LeFlufy: example of moving in the direction of the circular economy, right?
Um, but the circular economy is where it's truly everything goes around and round and doesn't need to, there is no waste anymore. There's no landfill kind of thing. And so I don't know if there's loads of stats about [00:28:00] the waste problem. So one, one crazy stat about the waste problem, right, And this is a few years ago now, but I assume it's probably still true.
Um, the amount of e waste, so electronic waste, which is created each year. So that includes basic things like toasters and things like washing machines and computers and smart, all of that kind of stuff, right? The amount of e waste that's created each year weighs more than every commercial aircraft that's ever been built.
Whoa.
Andrea Hiott: It's almost just, you can't even, like, it's hard to understand that. Yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: exactly. It's just
Andrea Hiott: mind blowing. And it's so frustrating in a way that there's so much junk, it feels like junk or something to me. Exactly. But you show, I think actually with the toaster example, and many other examples in the book of how the way we create products, And the way we think about what the product does can start to change this quite quickly if people just get the idea and I, what I heard you just saying and what I was thinking of in reading the book is also just knowing that there are other options and [00:29:00] thinking about long time in a different way instead of the linear model, which seems to just think of in the moment what I need and then get rid of it.
This is like considering, oh, how is this going to be used in 20 years or 30 years or, it's a different time conception too, isn't it? A bit. Right. Right.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, I guess it kind of is actually, yeah, because exactly, you're looking for kind of things to cycle through time in order to be able to continue, having a decent society indefinitely into the future time kind of thing.
Andrea Hiott: You give the example of building in a modular way so that if something breaks, you can replace the part easily, whereas now with a toaster, you just throw the toaster away.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So basically there are various, people have been working on the circular economy for quite a while now, and there are various kind of general strategies. As you say, one of them is, modular parts so that if just one part breaks, you can take it out and replace it and you don't have to replace the entire thing. And there's a whole bunch of, Of other strategies and in order to so yeah recycling does it a little bit but [00:30:00] recycling is more like adding a loop onto the linear economy, whereas to actually make a truly circular economy, you need to build it into each part of the process, of the material flows that lifecycle products, etc.
So for example, If you build things with, intricate combinations of, materials, so like combining plastic and metal and, uh, paper or whatever else kind of thing, then that makes the whole thing much harder to recycle because you need to recycle the different materials. You need to separate them in order to recycle them, so it can make things unrecyclable.
So that means that you have to include, you have to think about circularity when you're designing products, which is very doable. And as you mentioned, I've got examples in my book of
Andrea Hiott: all these different things. And also what materials you use. Thinking about at the beginning, not just creating some crazy mashup of chemicals that seems right for the short term, but as you show, if you really think about the materials and how they go in.
over a long period of time, it becomes easier to have this [00:31:00] circular flow of things being reused, rather than it just being too much work, to separate everything out. But this this is part of a kind of, a business model too, right? Now we can get towards the future guardians because a lot of the business models and the idea of the corporation and all of is built more on that linear model, isn't it?
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So the second, actually the second part I was going to say with the circular economy is, that with business models, a lot of business models are basically built around If you sell, the more things you sell, the more money you make, and then they're also aimed at profit maximization, right?
So that is a whole kind of dynamic pushing the creation of more and more stuff in order to sell it and make money.
Andrea Hiott: Cause you wouldn't want to have this long term thing, right? You just want to build as much stuff and sell it as quickly as possible in that model.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yes, exactly.
Yeah. So then you've got to think about with the business model, uh, not just on the profit maximization side, but the way in which. Profit increases. So a classic example of this, is doing sale of service. So if a business is selling the [00:32:00] service of product provides, right, rather than the product itself, that means that when the product breaks, the individual one that someone's using, they still are allowed the service. So they can send it back to the company and get another. And that means that basically the cost of, Repairs, is put onto the company. So then the company is incentivized just as financial interest is incentivized to, make the products last much longer.
Andrea Hiott: Which is just wonderful because that changes, the priorities in a way such that the company itself is going to want to do all these things that you mentioned in the book and that we've touched on in terms of what the way they build the object, because they're going to be the ones having to rebuild the object. So the people are paying for the service, not the object.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So, Yeah, so with the to kind of tie between the circular economy and the future guided model, things like sale of service can work in some circumstances for companies that are only profit maximizing because they actually make more profit as well, but intrinsically.
[00:33:00] Doing a circular economy is not aligned with profit maximization. It's just a separate thing, right? And so there are the vast majority of cases it's, if a company is profit maximizing, then it's only got a very slight incentive to do desire, whatever to do circular economy things, right?
So to get a truly circular economy, part of it is that we need companies and all of the examples. Of, so in the circular economy chapter, I go through a whole bunch of exemplars of that demonstrate the different strategies for getting into the circular economy. And I didn't plan for this to be like this, but it turned out that all of the examples that I gave were organizations that were strongly either like actually intrinsically the way they're designed or just very strongly motivated by things other than profit. Because when you're not thinking about profit, you can think about doing the best for the world or, for creating the circular economy or for whatever thing it is you want to be doing. And so the future garden [00:34:00] model is this model that, um, it redefines business. They've rewritten the articles of association, which are kind of like the constitution of the business so that, you know, It's no longer profit maximizing and the way they've, they've, they're based in Wales, so they've done it in a way that works within, um, British company law.
So you don't need to change the law in the uk, at least you don't need to change the law in order to do this. A company can just become a Future Guardian. .
Um, and the, they did all the hard
Andrea Hiott: work. Exactly. Figuring out how to do it.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. And this is the thing, right? These are people like Kate Raworth and River Simple um, well the, so the guys who kind of designed the model were Hugo Spowers, uh, Patrick Andrews and Joel Getzendaner.
Right. Good. Thanks for saying that. Designed the, designed the structure and RiverSimple is pioneering it as a company and yeah, and then other people doing the other one. So basically there are these small groups of people who are like really dedicated to solving these specific problems and they have done right. And then there's a whole bunch of people who, like [00:35:00] much more people, still a small proportion of overall society, but still quite a lot of people who want to, like, really want to have a positive effect and improve the way the world is and what have you.
Right. And so my idea in my book is I'm bringing together all these things and describing them as, you know, Kind of clearly and I, I use as little jargon as I can and, you know, make it as easy to read as I can, but also going through the practical, like how you can actually do this kind of thing and how, how it works, the nuts and bolts
Andrea Hiott: yeah. You really show it. It really makes it clear that it's possible and that it's not even that much work. If you just look at how it's being done now, you can adapt. But River Simple, we didn't say maybe you should just describe a little this. Future
Paddy LeFlufy: Guardian. Yeah.
So they're a, hydrogen fuel cell car company, based in Wales. They haven't actually gone to market yet. They're looking for funding for their first factory at the moment. So if anyone happens to have a spare a hundred million quid, then give it to Riversimple and invest it.
Andrea Hiott: But they've, they've done all this work of structuring the company already so that once it's going, it's, [00:36:00] it's a completely different model. It's actually aligning the goals and interests of the company with the customer in this way, the sell to service way in an expanded sense that you were talking about
Paddy LeFlufy: such that.
Yeah. So the sale of service thing is kind of the site. So that's the business model, but the river simple, the future guided model is the governance structure. So essentially the kind of quick way of describing it kind of thing is that instead it, it legally makes it so that rather than the company, um, being pursuing growth as its goal, it pursues a purpose, which is written into the articles that, you the individual company
Andrea Hiott: build and operate vehicles while systematically pursuing elimination of the environmental impact
caused by personal transport. I actually wrote that down. That's
Paddy LeFlufy: a nice one. Yeah. That's River Simple's one. And then any other company could do an equivalent one, but it doesn't need to be, be like kind of social impact.
Andrea Hiott: Right. There's a kind of template and you can fit it to,
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can just, whatever a business is doing, you can just turn that into a purpose essentially. Right. Yeah. And then, so the articles are like, yeah, pursue the purpose while balancing [00:37:00] and protecting the following uh, benefit streams, they call them, which are essentially miniature statements of purpose for each of six stakeholder groups.
So the stakeholder groups are the employees, the customers, the commercial partners, the investors, the community, and the environment. So for example, environment
Andrea Hiott: is, is in there, that's one of them, yeah, exactly.
Paddy LeFlufy: Highlight that. Okay. Yeah, so this means and because they're saying, and then they have a few sentences specifically saying that they need to be balanced and none, no one of them should be given primacy and so on and so forth.
Right. So what it's saying is that the main goal is pursuing the purpose, right? So the company needs to be able to keep doing that. But within that, it should be giving equal weight, equal stakeholder groups. And one of them is the investors. So that's about making profit. So it's still. about making some profit, but it's just saying that making profit is no more important to the company than having less negative impact on the environment or [00:38:00] treating its employees well.
Andrea Hiott: Or even that all of these can go together. You can make as much profit. In fact, once it's running, it could be incredibly profitable and that's not a bad thing. It's just that you're not doing it in this old way that we just described this linear model. The way it's designed, there's so many different, checks and balances on, on the stakeholders, the shareholders,
Paddy LeFlufy: and essentially it could be, very profitable, but if it is, then it has to also be very good for all of those other stakeholder groups.
And so one of the main kind of approaches to this is alignment of interests. So the circular economy is a really good example of this actually. The, yeah, using a sale of service business model aligns the interest of, the environment, the investors and the customers because customers want things that work well, right.
That don't break. And the, And it's better for the environment as well, because it doesn't use as much material stuff. And then by using sale of service model, this means it's also better for the investors to make things that don't break. So all three of those interests are aligned by making things that are [00:39:00] more durable.
And it can get more complicated
Andrea Hiott: than that, but It's wonderful in this kind of fractal way where the interests of what's in the old model seemed like competitive or dichotomous things like the environment and profit investing, they sort of end up towards this common goal so there's this kind of checks and balances system, whereby everyone's It's pursuing their interests still, but those interests are aligned in a way that the growth or the profit is going to end up being something that's actually healthy in this kind of bigger sense of the word.
Paddy LeFlufy: Exactly. Yeah. And one of the things about it, right, is that so at the moment, a lot, there are loads of people, even in, you know, quite high up in big companies, kind of people who want to have more positive impact effect.
They realize how bad their companies are. The problems, the environmental problems are causing and that kind of thing. But because of the, profit motive, the legal structure with the profit motive, they can't you know, it's like
Andrea Hiott: standing in front [00:40:00] of a train or something. It just feels, yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: exactly.
Yeah. And so by changing the future garden model, this changes that legal basis and therefore allows people to do a whole bunch of better things basically.
Andrea Hiott: Do you see this as something that can be a continuous change from this older model to something like future guardians, or do you really think that this paradigm has to just throw out everything from the past and replace it? Yeah, no,
Paddy LeFlufy: on the future guardian side, it's quite a big change, right? It is quite a transformative kind of a change. It's not throwing out the company. It's just changing the structures and therefore having quite transformative change so each individual company can do it, but because.
At the moment, the people who have the power to change the articles of association of a company that's already running are the shareholders, the investors, right? So, um, they need to get on board with the future guardian model, which essentially involves seeding power and to some extent profit, because the whole point is to not just look at, not just go for profit for them.
Right. [00:41:00] So in some cases, there are some companies, you know, one example of a massive one is Patagonia that was recently changed it's, um, changed its structure in a different way. Um, and there are loads of other companies that are kind of already going in that kind of direction and want to make changes, right?
So those are the kind of ones want to have a better effect, et cetera. So those are the kinds of ones that are most likely to change the Future Guardian model early on. Right. If you're in. Shell or something like that, and I'm just not going to change the future garden model. It
Andrea Hiott: really goes back to vision and what's the kind of overall goal of the company.
And if it's just profit, then it's going to be a lot harder. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But if it's something like Patagonia, as you point out in your book, which already started with a very different goal and vision, and we're trying to implement things early on, then it's going to be easier.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. So the future garden model initially for spreading it, which is something I'm hoping to kind of get going, um, initially it's something that companies that already want to do good [00:42:00] can change to, right, to allow them to do so.
And, but then as it builds up momentum, if it becomes more well known and more companies are doing it and there's, you know, organizations helping companies do it and that kind of thing, then we can also, it can also become a kind of social pressure. you know, like, well, this is obviously a good idea. And so that can weaken.
It's kind of like gradually turning each people on different parts of the spectrum of going towards wanting to do better. Right. And so
Andrea Hiott: it becomes cool
Paddy LeFlufy: and trendy in a way. Exactly. Come on, cool and trendy. And then more companies like, Oh, let's do that. Yeah, and recognizing that, oh, that's a way that we can, have way more positive effect. So then over time, more and more companies can do it. And it's something that can be applied to, it's harder to apply it to very small companies because it's got a bit of a
Andrea Hiott: cumbersome structure.
Yeah, you say that in the book, but you show also other alternatives
like the B labs And B corporations, how does that technology fit with this?
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. Um, what you were asking about the, is it like chucking out the old replace it? Yeah I'll kind of [00:43:00] dig into that a little bit more.
Yeah. Please do. Um B Labs is a good example for this on this specific thing of the business is changing. Right. Um, B Labs is an organization that they do a certification and they're doing really great work and they've got, it goes up all the time, but last time I looked, I think it was over 7, 000.
Organizations are B labs, right? And to become a B lab, what you need to, or a B Corp sorry. You need to pass a certification, which basically checks that they're doing. Um, you get points for each good stakeholder, essentially, apart from the investors, cause everyone's already doing. everything for them kind of thing. And if you get a high enough score, then you pass that part of the certification. And then the other aspect of it is that you have to write something into your articles so that it's about more than profit, right? Um, so that's, that's the Yeah, changing that kind of deep design as well. But the way in which it's doing it, first of all, to be on the certification side, it's like, it's a bar.
So once you've got over that bar, you've just [00:44:00] got over that bar and they can have kind of extras for a little bit extra or whatever, but it's basically just, Get to that level. And then on the article side is just saying something as well as profit. So essentially what it does is it gets companies to move from being purely profit focused to being profit focused, but also being decent.
If you see what I mean, but profit still the main aim, right? So in that sense, it's improving, it's making a, an improvement to the current system as opposed to changing it to a different paradigm, as opposed to changing it to a different paradigm, whereas the future guardian model. Completely takes down the profit motive. It doesn't get rid of the profit motive completely. It includes it, but it says it's on an equal footing with all of the other stakeholder groups and subordinate to the purpose. So in that sense, it's a wholly different system, a wholly different kind of paradigm because the profit is just no longer the main thing.
Andrea Hiott: There's so much good work and you show it in your book with these regenerative organizations, which are basically waking people up to the fact that they can have [00:45:00] different goals and that they can start to build different goals.
Build things in, um, in
Paddy LeFlufy: terms of a different structure. Yeah. Regenerative organizations that it's about structuring it rather than, so the corporate structure is the main one, not just for businesses, but big charities, basically all big organizations in that kind of general area are corporations insofar as they're centralized, hierarchical
big corporations kind of thing. Right. And kind of monolithic, whereas regenerative organizations, and there are various examples like fab labs, transition that you give some great ones in the book, yeah, I go through four in quite a lot of detail, which are fab labs, transition network, open source ecology, and Bendigo community bands and they're all, Big organizations, um, opensourcecology is still quite small, but the other three are absolutely massive, um, and have thousands of nodes and they're, they have different details in the structure, but the overall idea is that what they're doing is connecting local groups or organizations, kind of like local nodes of whatever type it might be through a global network.
So that the [00:46:00] nodes are still fairly independent, but need to, they need to comply with the ethos and rules of the network, and then they share things around the network. So it's essentially, yeah, a different, structure to the kind of alternative.
Um, so on the systemic side of things where it's like, uh, is it a new system? Is it getting rid of the old system, et cetera? Like there's putting these things together, right. They each change. paradigms in the area that they're approaching.
And if they're put together, and as I go into a bit in the conclusion of the book, and I'm developing more and more of my own, thinking and writing at the moment, they can go together to create an entirely new economic system, right. But in order to get there, we still have to get there from where we are now.
So it's not about chucking out the old, the current system. It's about making changes to it that are transformative, that can be done. So they're kind of incremental, like one company changes the future garden [00:47:00] model is kind of incremental, right? But then as they spread, they're moving towards a whole, a holistic new system.
Um, there's quite a good, I don't mention in my book actually, but there's a good, conceptual, um, Way of seeing this is quite well known called the three horizons model so the idea is this H1, these are the three horizons and they're kind of conceptual horizons as opposed to time horizons, right? The H1 is like the status quo. So if you're doing things or making innovations that are pure H1 ones, you're just keeping the status quo going, right?
And then H3 is the utopia that we're aiming for kind of thing. And that can be applied to lots of different things, but, look at it in the systemic sense. And then, H two is in the middle. So that's, innovations that are, cause the thing with H three is it's like what we want to get to, but it's, and there are little things doing it. Like. Each of these things we've been talking about is doing an H3 kind of thing.
Like the donut is an H3 thing, right? The future garden is an H3 thing. In a lot of cases, you [00:48:00] can't just go straight to H3 kind of thing. So then H2 is the innovations that are moving away from the, status quo away from status quo and towards what we're aiming for. So that the transition between the status quo and, what we're aiming for, the kind of new system, there's H2 plus and H2 minus.
And basically some innovations are seeming to improve things, but actually get co opted into H1. So they're like greenwashing kind of style. And then what you really need to find are the ways of Changing the current status quo, the H1, in ways that will actually get to where we're going, where we want to go, H3, and that's the H2 plus ones, right?
So Massive centralized recycling is a classic H2 minus example, because it seems like it's getting better and it makes people feel like, oh yeah, it's kind of like the circular economy because we put things in the recycling and it's not going in the bin kind of thing, right?
But actually, most of it ends up being in landfill and it it's essentially putting an extra loop in the, in the linear economy, [00:49:00] but it's not making it properly circular, right? So that's a h2 minus thing.
Whereas an h2 plus one is the kind of things that I describe in my book of changing the designs and the business models and the whole kind of structure to make it easy for things to cycle around and around. So yeah, in terms of the system. I'd say like the overall ideas, the organizational technologies I'm describing in the book are, the H3.
They're like where we want to get to in the different areas. And then the specifics, cause actually, although we've talked about the concepts quite a lot in this thing, cause it's a good way of introducing it. Actually, most of the writing in the book is about real world examples of people putting it into action and those examples are all the kind of h2 plus ones that are pushing in the right direction
Andrea Hiott: that's why I actually want people to buy the book and read those examples, because I think it's very practical the way you present all of this and you give detailed examples that are actually existing of companies now. You also talk about currency. We don't really have time to go into it [00:50:00] here, but you talk about the shift of currency, and something I really didn't know before reading the book was this idea of where money is generated, and that it's not, I think you say it's like 97 percent is coming from banks
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. So this is actually what the Bank of England says. So normally, uh, before you look into it properly, as it were, the way most people think about money is it gets made by like minting, exactly. Minting coins and printing notes or that kind of thing. Um, but actually nowadays that's a very small amount of how, of money being created.
And so the way the Bank of England explains The creation of money is that, um, that's 3%. 97 percent is created as private banks when they make loans. So say you go and ask for a mortgage, right? The bank doesn't have a stack of money somewhere. It doesn't even have a stack of electronic money somewhere, right?
It doesn't have the money to give you that it gives you for the mortgage. Instead, it has the power [00:51:00] to make a loan to you, right? Out of thin air, essentially. So it can just say, okay, you have this money and you owe it to me as well, kind of thing. So that effectively creates money because it's the debt side of it that the bank has just sits there on its on its balance sheet, right?
And whereas the it's giving you the the ability to spend money by buying the house, right? And having the ability to spend money is like having money, right? So that is money and that's the Bank of England. It says it's, that's how money is created at the moment.
Andrea Hiott: And then
Paddy LeFlufy: perhaps even stranger is that they're actually destroying it as well when, so when you pay back the loan, so they can loan you money, but they have, part of it is it's a loan.
You have to repay it. Right. And when you repay it, the bank can't then spend it. It has to cancel it off against the debt that it's written into its balance sheet kind of thing. Um, so when you repay it, that gets destroyed again. Banks don't just say, here's some money, give [00:52:00] me back the same amount of money later, right?
Banks say, give it back to me with interest, right? So that interest is on money that didn't exist before kind of thing. And it means that you have to go out and make more money than you were given in order to, or you were loaned in order to repay it in order to repay the bank. And that extra interest is profit for the bank.
The bank can then use that as money. It just kind of becomes money, right? So it basically means that. Once you've got a loan, you need to go and because essentially all money is made like this, when you get a loan, you need to go and get more money in order to pay it back. But that more money itself, the interest part is also created as a loan to someone else that you've sold something to, for example, and got the thing from, and got the money from. So essentially people are always chasing more and more money. There always needs to be more and more money to pay off that interest or to have that interest. I haven't explained that very articulately, sorry.
Andrea Hiott: No, there's so much [00:53:00] there. To try to relate it to what we've been talking about so far, it seems part of that same linear. Idea or model that there's must always be growth
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So it drives growth because, everyone's chasing more money essentially to when they get loans to pay back the interest, that means that more money needs to be created. And so technically it's feasible that wouldn't result, that would result in inflation rather than growth.
Right. And I go into the details of it in my book. In reality, it clearly actually causes growth, a bit of inflation, but also growth because banks are motivated by the profit of giving more loans and et cetera, et cetera. So it like pushes it that way.
Andrea Hiott: And it's this very personal, personal connection into all of our lives because we are using money in this way.
And it is tied to this, these other things you've already discussed in terms of the growth paradigm and the primacy of the profit and so on. So as you [00:54:00] show in the book, which people are just going to have to read to get this part, um, because we'd have to do a whole other conversation about sovereign currency, but you do go into all of these, but it's all tied together, all these things.
It, a change has to come economically through all of this
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. So it's one of those things where it's through all of it, but each part we can do and each part is positive as well. So it doesn't, we don't need to change to a sovereign money system in order to move to the future garden model. And we don't need to move to the future garden model in order to, get into the doughnut or try to get into the doughnut at least kind of thing. We can try and do all of these things. And, and also they can be done by people in different parts of society. So there are things that basically like any community can just do, there's loads and loads of them all around the world already.
Um, so, I go through kind of exemplars of each of the main ways of doing it kind of thing.
Andrea Hiott: You discuss these in the book. You show six technologies that are, a different way than this way, this linear way. You give examples of it and you present it as a kind [00:55:00] of practical handbook. So even though these seem like really big ideas and a lot of these corporations are big, you also talk about a lot a lot of individual possibilities for starting the shift, even if it's incremental. And a lot of it also, I think you show as cognitive, just being aware of all these possibilities is already a huge advantage. Because if you don't know it's possible, you don't think about it.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. So, um, in the book, there's loads of examples for, people in different. Parts of society, in different jobs or whatever. So for example, if you're working in a business that's, um, kind of progressive as it were, then the future guided model. So talking to, um, the kind of people, obviously it's the kind of thing that needs to be ultimately done by, from the top of the company, but, talking to people in the company and getting knowledge of the Future Guardian model and trying to get it moving in that direction is something that one can do. And then if you're in local government, then using complimentary currencies is particularly good in local, like local governments, particularly suited to putting them into practice kind of thing. Um, but there's also things, loads of things that just. [00:56:00] Anyone can do, right? So one of them is, joining community organizations in your area. So deal has, there are loads of groups joining or starting if they don't exist in your area from deal transition network and, online ones, open source ecology. And another, as you say, it's like learning about these ideas and then talking about them because it's like the more that people know about these things and thinking about, for example, if you know someone who's a, an entrepreneur, young person starting to become an entrepreneur kind of thing, then telling them about regenerative organizations and the future guardian model so that they can think about that as something to use actually a really good example of this on most people don't know people like the guys who started Google, right?
But Google, and it started, they had their motto of, , Don't do evil or something like that. Right. Or don't be evil. Right. And they basically were very idealistic and wanted to do good, but the model that they had to use, the one available kind of thing was just the profit motive one. So they've become this gigantic conglomerate and [00:57:00] basically the money profit motive is,
Andrea Hiott: is really strong
Paddy LeFlufy: if it had been widely known about and just accepted that it was an option, they would probably have become a future guardian. Google would have Yeah, and there
Andrea Hiott: would have been checks and balances on that exorbitant, that huge amount of profit that then, you just get carried away in the inertia of it.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. But all of that would have, it would have just been much better for the world essentially. So yeah, telling, like just talking about it generally, there's loads of other way, people that it's useful to talk about it to, or have you. And then this ties into the next thing. Um, basically putting more money into doing good things. So loads of the things in my book, some of them are for investment style, but also things that are not investment style. So like tool libraries are one of the examples in the second economy.
And one way of increasing the amount of money that one can give is basically giving capital amounts, right? So, most people think about their income as one thing and their capital as a kind of separate thing, obviously you have to save up to create the capital, but there's a kind of separate thing.
So when you're, for example, putting a deposit down on a [00:58:00] house or you're buying a car or something that's, big, you know, a few grand or more, if you just think of it basically budget for an extra 10 percent and just imagine that instead of being a hundred thousand for your, deposit on your house is 110, 000, right?
And Mentally act as if it's that and save up for that kind of thing, but then that extra 10 grand give to something that like give it to creating this new economy and this the same approach can be used for other things nature conservation basically, there's a massive amount of positive things that are limited by money. But one of the issues, right. Is that a lot of basically the, there's a fair, quite a strong inverse color correlation between people who want to transform things in a positive way and people who have money. So for example, a lot of the kind of boomer generation have housing wealth. And. Are often like statistically whatever less interested in doing economic transformation type things. So [00:59:00] talking to people about this kind of thing and opening their minds to these kind of possibilities can potentially have a big effect and doing it in your own life, but also talking about it to other people as well kind of thing can potentially have a very positive effect. And then another kind of general approach is basically look at what doesn't yet exist, and then make it happen.
There are just loads of things that need to be done that aren't yet being done, so when you see those kind of things, then think about that as an actual thing you might do, like setting up an organization, or if you see one that's set up, then helping it grow, etc.
So when I In the years after leaving uni kind of thing. And I've been to Cambridge that I quite a few really going for it kind of people. Um, and so quite a few people became entrepreneurs, and this was of my friends who became entrepreneurs. This was basically their approach was that they saw something that they wanted to exist, but it didn't exist.
And they're like, well, we can just make this thing and then turn it into a business and grow and be entrepreneurs. [01:00:00] And that's that was within the paradigm of basically making money, doing a startup, making money, selling it kind of thing. But the same approach can be done within the paradigm of, transforming, positive transformation because there's loads of things that need to be done.
And so it's just applying that, right, let's just get on and do it kind of attitude. And so that's for, young entrepreneurs or, but also for people. Older people who are like changing career or considering doing it, it's something that can be done as well. I've actually got a specific individual example of someone I met through Q and A's about my book, Gavin Fernie Jones, who, so he was running until Brexit happened he was running a couple of ski shops in the Alps,
and, kind of doing his thing, kind of thing. And, um, and he was very consensus ized at the time. He was very like, you know, trying to improve the environmental impact, but he also recognized that basically ski shops, skiing is not an environmentally positive thing, full stop, right?
And then when Brexit happened, he, so on the day that Brexit [01:01:00] happened, because most of his customers from the UK, he knew that it was going to be a very quiet day. And so he decided that they would have a repair day in their shop, , or outside their shop.
Paddy LeFlufy: And he got, some people who could do repairs and he was just like, let's do it. I think he called it F Brexit, let's fix it or something And, and he also had a thing where he. Asked people to donate old clothes, the old outdoor clothes, ski clothes, or what have you, that he would then sell.
And all of the profits would go, all of the sales cost will go towards tree planting. And he just did it as a one off day and it was really successful. So he did a couple more over the next few months. And in those three days, he, Earned for, um, turned into tree planting, 000 pounds. Right. And he was like, wow, this is a really good thing.
So he was then, he set up a little, organization, community organization, and he was like helping chalets to have more, positive effects and et cetera, et cetera. And then about a year, and so Brexit only happened, uh, like five or six years ago at this point, right? So it's all. just happened in the last few years.
And [01:02:00] then he, yeah, they got a bit of community space. So they turned into a community hub, repair for clothing, for bikes, for whatever else kind of thing. And then he was actually on a podcast and discussed chatting with the lady after the podcast, he realized, That doing a network would be a really good way of doing it, like the regenerative organization style networks, right?
And so he got in touch with a few a few other like, uh, places around in the next value or whatever that he knew were vaguely interested in this kind of area. And he turned it into what's now called the Reaction Collective. Um and now there's just over the last, I think he set up the collective itself two years ago, and there's already 36 members.
Of in the collective all around the world and it's an active group and they're really helping each other to both with ideas, but also with specific collaborate collaborations. And Fernie Jones is, is an amazing guy, but he's also just a normal person for the first 20 years after he left uni, he was running a ski shop or two, and we can all, We can all be those super [01:03:00] amazing guys is really what it comes, the kind of moral
Andrea Hiott: of the message.
And that's a good message. It's because I think now more than ever, we do have more tools to make these kinds of things happen. If we decide we're going to do it, we can. And I think also an important part is that it's coming from a place that is motivating. There's all these kinds of things that really matter to us, um, that get, as we said at the beginning, get left out in these older business models that, yeah, it does, um, it does take on its own energy once you get it started. And you can, as you were saying, it's not that much different from this old model of just starting a company out of nothing.
Google did it too. We, you know, this is what happens if you have an idea. Go for it. Yeah. Go for
Paddy LeFlufy: it. Yeah. Find a way. But go for it within the Within this new model though. Trying to, yeah, create a better
Andrea Hiott: system. If they read your book and look at these ways, you can start in a fresh and different and new way that adds a lot of meaning and you feel responsible for your environment, you feel connected globally, you're [01:04:00] also locally involved in all these things,
but just to end, I want to come back to you and this, nomadic guy. moving all around, studied mathematics, but then in all these different cultures and things. And now you've written this book and you're, your own path is sort of changed a lot, or, or has it? I wonder, like, how has this changed you doing all this research and putting it into a book? How's it changed you and your life, this writing of this book? Yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: yeah. So, um, I guess it has changed me actually. And so basically the, after when I was with the Wisdom Keeper in the Jungle for a kind of, essentially that was the culmination of the travel period or that travel period in my life kind of thing.
And then after that, got into seriously, so in 2015, seriously looking at how we can redesign society to make the world much better. But I didn't think about writing a book for another couple of years after that. And then someone, I was just kind of like chatting, spouting ideas kind of thing. And someone. Who had written books in the past was like, oh, you should write a book about that kind of thing, and then eventually I did.[01:05:00]
And basically I suppose it's changed me in terms of, I've kind of realized or feel like, I'm kind of in full, you know, trying to change the world mode essentially.. I was like, yeah, I was, I was like an interesting guy, an interesting and intelligent guy before, but I was basically just any old person roaming around the world, right?
And Now I feel like, yeah, I can actually have an effect on the world myself as well, you know?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And we all can, as you say. And I think there's a great service that you do. I think, you know, sometimes we don't realize that we see the world differently than others or that we've noticed certain things that
seem obvious to us but aren't obvious to others. And in a way, you did a lot of work and a lot of research in this, but in a way the gift is that you've put together a lot of things that aren't obvious to the world, but that maybe through your own experience and and trajectory became obvious to you and that you studied.
And It's a gift to put it in a form that people can read and understand. It's only a couple hundred pages, and the last thing I want to talk about is in the book somewhere you talk about companies that [01:06:00] care. It's almost like could be a kind of summary of what companies care about. All this ends up being, in a way, because we talked about River Simple and the Future Guardians, and we've talked a lot, and at the heart of that are people who really care. about, what they're doing, the same with you writing this book and the way it started with those conversations. There's a sense of caring about, making some kind of positive contribution, connecting with other people who want to do the same thing and this energy and motivation that's in that.
Um and this is called love and philosophy. So what do you think about this idea of caring and even, can we even talk about it as a kind of harmony, as a kind of love or something that's I mean, are we connecting to something that, that matters in that sense too?
Paddy LeFlufy: Um, yeah, so, I hadn't exactly thought about it in this kind of way before, but because your podcast is Love and Philosophy and from, you know, the email you sent me or whatever, I thought about it in the, from the kind of, Love perspective as it were.
And so, you know, love can mean many different things, but so my kind of working [01:07:00] definition of it. Um, but I basically just thought of in the last few weeks is, um, wanting that which is best for. So if you love something, you want that, which is very beautiful.
Andrea Hiott: Wanting that which is best for.
Paddy LeFlufy: For the object of love, kind of, of your love, kind of thing.
And so if you're acting lovingly, then you're doing that which you think is best for, and if you're successfully doing it, then what is actually best for, kind of thing. And the emotional feeling of love, the kind of fuzzy feeling, as it were, I suppose is a kind of natural mechanism to cause us to love the, to love in the sense of want that which is best for, the object of our feeling.
So it's a kind of creating love, Feeling. Um, and then so to connect based on that definit definition, to connect it to my life and work. So this does sound a little bit kind of grandiose or whatever, but, um, I, I do, in looking at it in from this perspective, I feel like my writing is motivated by my love of humanity as a whole, like, you know, the whole human species kind of thing.
Um, and I [01:08:00] could thinking about it because you, because of this podcast, I'm thinking about, I thought, well, I suppose the travel period, you know, that time when I was going and meeting humanity essentially, um, could be seen as the time in which I fell in love with humanity. So I really got that strong motivation and I was, I already had a kind of natural inclination to, um, You know, be on the side of people in general kind of thing.
Um, but to use it to compare it to kind of romantic love, it's like that was that natural inclination was like when you fancy someone or go on a date or two or whatever, and then the years of my travel period was, um, when I like actually fell in love with humanity kind of thing, and then. Um, so in that sense, my writing is kind of, yeah, motivated by my love of humanity, but I'm not sure whether that's a reasonable way of putting it.
Andrea Hiott: I think it is. And I don't think it's grandiose. I mean, it's hard to talk about. It's hard to use this word. It's one reason I named the podcast that because I feel like it's a very important thing. We can try to talk about what we're doing in the world in a way that, that matters [01:09:00] without it being cheesy or whatever, or too grandiose.
Because It does feel like that, it's a work, it's an act of love and I even think about long term relationships and how these are, you're constantly learning and you're constantly growing and you're constantly changing and they're not always easy and that is like writing a book.
And also when it comes to making these changes that you lay out in the book, really it's going to have to be a kind of act of caring or of love if it's going to succeed.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. And then another way of looking at the, the kind of new system that I'm trying to, uh, imagine, describe and get going a bit kind of thing. And these organizational technologies is that it's essentially creating a more loving system, right? So two examples. One is with the donut, right? So previous societal goal was economic growth. And the idea was it's a proxy for improving the situation of people.
So that is, it's trying to do that, which is best for, right. It's just that it's a poor proxy essentially. Right. Whereas the [01:10:00] donut aiming to meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet. That's really like expanding to everyone. Let's try and do, I mean, At least what's good for what's decent for get everyone into a decent position. That's a much better approximation of doing that, which is best for humanity than economic growth, which focuses on rich people and is a proxy, et cetera, et cetera. So in that sense, it's kind of building into the system, turning into a more loving system. And then the other kind of most clear example as well is the Future Guardian model going from profit maximization to having a purpose and then balancing The interests of the stakeholder groups.
So also in my book, I, suggest that maybe the future kind of improvement to the future garden model would be to include humanity as a whole as a stakeholder group. Um, so that, yeah, companies kind of think about an act on behalf of humanity as a whole as well. Um, and I go into how that could be done, et cetera. So basically by having that balance and protect the interests of. Um, [01:11:00] everyone that the company effect affects, that's essentially expanding the kind of love and that's, you know, the amount of people that the, that the company is trying to, or it's like built into the system of the companies to try to balance the interests and help and improve and do, and, you know, make things better for kind of thing.
So in that sense, again, it's kind of building into the system, just a more loving way of doing things.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, because it starts with something you care about and. And it's a relationship, it's not something that you're thinking of as external, it's really intimate, I think that's the thing even with these examples that you've given, there's an intimacy because it's actually life quality on an individual sense, but having these much larger scales of repercussions,
we always need these checks and balances, um, of not just becoming some kind of. Where it's an ideology or something of, of a new mindset or a new paradigm that it's, built into it is this [01:12:00] dynamism and this growth and checks and balances on, on all of this. Yeah. Yeah.
Paddy LeFlufy: No. And it is, um, and actually I kind of feel like the thinking about as you've, um, kind of prompted us to do thinking about, uh, in terms of love is one of the, one of the things One of the like difficulties and something I'm trying to kind of bridge is between the kind of idealistic, like, Oh, everything should be nice.
And that's, you know, like, blah, blah, blah kind of thing. And then the actual, well, we need to like, look at things and analyze and work out how to actually make things work. Because in order to get to a better place, we need to, you know, make it work, right. And then it's also like everyone should be trying to improve things as well and not get ideological about any of these kinds of things.
It's a balance always. Exactly. Yeah. Always a balance and everyone doing, you know, I'm just putting together all the things that I think are ways of improving. And if people agree with me, then they should. Hopefully, you know, like [01:13:00] do some of them and what have you and we'll use some of them or to some extent, et cetera.
Uh, but also only if they agree with me, I'm not like
Andrea Hiott: trying to, no, and it doesn't come off like that at all. I just meant more when we start because there's so, uh, we can get so motivated by these issues. I think a lot of people, we, we feel very passionate about the environment, about change and it's very easy to kind of close off even though we feel like we're being loving and opening.
Um, Yeah. And, and that, that's also a danger, I was just trying to put it out there because, you know, we, once we open to the emotion of it and the feeling of it, which is there, an important part, and it is a relationship, we also have to be aware that we can also get, you know, carried away by our emotions, or we can think because other people don't feel it, we should, you know, Yeah.
You know, it can just, it can get tricky, right? So it's both of these things, what you were saying too, though, um, it's not just about getting carried away in the feeling. We actually, to, to change, we need new frameworks, we need practical [01:14:00] models, but I think that's what you're offering in the book but we also need. The love.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's like having the love, as it were, you know, like really wanting to improve things and also thinking clearly and analytically and, you know, like how can we actually do it? And then, as you say, not getting carried away and ideological about it, recognizing that we are.
We might be wrong or there might be better ways of doing things or there might be unexpected unforeseen circumstances or, you know, and so keeping that kind of like, it's a bit of a like internal check and balance on ourselves as well, basically, isn't it? That we're like, yeah. And that can all, I feel like that all kind of like successful love, it has to include all of those things.
Andrea Hiott: You know what I mean? Yeah. Real love or unconditional love or, yeah, it is all That's kind of the, the hope and the idea that, that we find ways of, of living in that space more often. So there's this [01:15:00] ongoing kind of um, process of figuring out a new way, coming up with new ideas, having very specific templates and models, but also knowing those are just uh, templates and models and we also continually shift them a little bit too as we go.
Okay. Yeah. Like a relationship.
Paddy LeFlufy: Yeah. And things that are, um, you know, appropriate in one circumstance or at one time, that doesn't mean they're always going to be appropriate, just as in the early 20th century for a lot of people, it looked like, and from that perspective really was true, that economic growth was a very good thing.
And even in the mid 20th century, but then. Like at this point, it's, it's no longer, there are, there are just too many externalities. So it's kind of a temporal thing as well. Right. And the same with these things, the idea is to get to a better place, but then there might be, there definitely will be other better ways of doing things as well.
And then once we get there, maybe changing things will make, will be appropriate and et
Andrea Hiott: cetera, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. And each situation will require a little bit of a. different [01:16:00] shift. We were talking about the different kinds of systems and how it's not like choosing one system or it's not saying growth is bad or it's, somehow trying to open the space so that. We can hold all these things, growth doesn't have to be good or bad necessarily, um, but we can think of it in terms of the trajectory of the system that it's part of, and is it really the only option? Is it what we want? What are some other options? So, and I feel like that's what you're doing with your book, isn't it?
You're showing a whole, a wider space of what's possible. You're not necessarily rejecting everything that ever came before. Yeah,
Paddy LeFlufy: and yeah, and I've done a lot of like in because in this book, I'm kind of concentrating on the nuts and bolts and, but explaining it clearly and with the concepts at first or have you, but I wanted it to be quite a practical one.
So I haven't gone into. the kind of, cognitive, I think as you put it, um, the cognitive side as much, but obviously I've done quite a lot of that myself. But it's in there. Yeah. Cause it's an important part of the whole overall kind of movement that we need to do. Yeah. [01:17:00]
Andrea Hiott: And you don't see like the past systems as your enemy or something, do you?
Paddy LeFlufy: No, exactly. That's another thing that it's one of these things that it's so easy to get. bogged down in arguments about, Oh, that was bad. Or that was bad or blah, blah, blah. It doesn't really matter. What we need to do is improve things. Now. We know that there are, there's an environmental catastrophe on its way.
And we absolutely have to change things so that we get out of its way. I want to get it out of our way kind of thing. Um, so rather than arguing about that, having people guilty or shamed or whatever, it's like, well, no. Okay, you might have done whatever it was then, but now we know we need to do the better things here a bunch of better options.
Let's just get on and do it.
Andrea Hiott: That's exactly right. That's the great place to end because yeah, it's possible. Let's get on with it. Let's do it. Let's join together. There's a lot to be done and it's fun. It's fun to think about what we can do. So thanks so much Patty for writing the book and I look forward to the upcoming stuff and work and ideas from you
Paddy LeFlufy: great. Yeah. And thanks very much for having me on the [01:18:00] podcast. It's been a very enjoyable
Andrea Hiott: conversation. It has been. See you.