Going Beyond Sustainability

Eduardo: [00:01:34] In today’s episode, we have Ra James, he’s the founder of (re)Biz, a 31-day online workshop and emergent creation lab for leaders who are ready to build a regenerative post-growth world. He also has created Future Elders, an online un-school, focussing on healing the future [00:02:00] through remembering the original wisdom of global culture elders, realizing that wisdom is far more powerful than knowledge, and he is the true catalyst for transformational and innovative global change. Ra is also the founder of Pueo Regeneration, one of the world’s first regenerative consulting firms that advises businesses worldwide on how to activate their purpose, create adaptive leadership strategies based on biomimicry, and implement kincentric worldview shifts into organizational operations and culture. He speaks globally on this topic. Welcome to the show, Ra. 

Ra: Thank you. Good to be here. 

Eduardo: The thing that comes to mind when you speak about this concept is this idea of a future of abundance, which is popular and it’s attractive. So green growth and the advocates of green growth say that there’s a future of abundance, and abundance can be for everybody. And that’s utopia. 

First of all, let’s define abundance. What does abundance mean? Are we talking about lots of [00:03:00] Teslas? I mean, thriving within a bunker because there will be nothing else, or what is abundance? Is it abundance of material, wealth for humans, or is it really a thriving planet with all forms of life?

Ra: Yeah, I think that’s a really good question that you kind of caught yourself with. Well, what do these words mean that we’re saying? This is one of the deepest confusions that we have now is language. What do I mean when I say abundance? What do I mean when I say growth?

What do I mean when I say beauty?

These words are almost just floating like there’s no tether. So abundance, oftentimes we view it as material abundance, which is what you’re saying with the Tesla, with this, with this. But I think abundance for me is happiness. It’s connection with community, with deep, deep relationship connections. [00:04:00] It’s connections with the land. It’s being able to grow my own food. It’s being able to walk down the street and not see my relatives suffering from homelessness and drug addiction. And I mean, that is abundance, too, right? Because it’s about us. It’s not about me. So abundance can only benefit me. That would actually be antithetical to what abundance means, because abundance means that there’s so much of it that it overflows, like “abundancia”. Like it just goes. And if I’m accumulating it and hoarding it in my own little section, like, that’s not abundance, that’s greed. So abundance means that it overflows. 

Something that I find really interesting is from what I’ve learned of, like, partially some of the Lakota worldviews is when someone was sick in their village or their tribe, [00:05:00] that person was a messenger showing what needed to be healed within the tribe. They weren’t to be exiled somewhere else. They were showing them and taking on the burden of an illness within the tribe that has created that illness within the person. 

What is abundance? Well, abundance would be being able to heal the illnesses and the woes of society that are reflecting upon the way that the society is functioning, that’s creating the illness in the first place.

That’s abundance, abundance is health. How many people are obese across the world? You know, is that abundance now? Just because you’re bigger is that abundance? Abundance is health. I mean, health is wealth. Anybody knows this when they get injured and they’re living a good life. And then you get injured and you’re just like, oh, my God, what do I do? That’s when you know that your health is the most important thing.

Eduardo: Within this concept of abundance. [00:06:00] Because of this whole idea of accumulation, right? And accumulation is rooted in a deep fear of scarcity. I mean, that’s why we accumulate and we become perhaps greedy. Because we fear that sometime in the future there may be a lack. So if we secure the next ten generations and build multi-generational wealth, we’ll be okay. And so how do we combat that fear as a society, as individuals?

Ra: One way is realizing that despite how much multi-generational wealth you have, if your multi-generational wealth and the multi-generational wealth of others is harming the planet on which you plan to spend your multigenerational wealth, it’s not going to really function too well if you’re extracting from the planet and harming other people. And like, let’s look at a lot of the refugee situations that are happening on the planet.

A lot of them are related to natural resources, if not all of them. [00:07:00] So these people are now going into different countries seeking a safe life where they can live and they’re now encroaching upon, from a specific person’s point of view, let’s say from this person who you’re saying is accumulating multi-generational wealth, who lives up in some penthouse somewhere and a big home and a nice place over here…

The more the environments are changing and countries are experiencing droughts and countries are experiencing resource loss and people are having to move to these certain places and sea levels are rising… Like, let’s say all of this stuff’s happening right as you’re accumulating the wealth, trying to block yourself off from the suffering of the world. The suffering of the world is going to come to meet you where you’re at because eventually there are not going to be any places for those people to live.

So, like, as much as you’re trying to block yourself off from it and go hoard yourself off into a bunker, people are going to need to go to places where they’re able to live. And despite your bunker, despite the penthouse, despite the wealth that you have, [00:08:00] if you’re unable to get food, if you’re unable to have clean water, if you’re unable to have clean air, it’s like, all of these things are necessary for your own life.

So once again, it’s about “we”. How do you make yourself safe? You create safety around you. You create systems that benefit the thriving of other people. Because why would someone who’s thriving try to jump you on the street for your money? Think about homelessness and all these things. Why does that exist? Well, because there’s been a massive extraction of wealth and the ability to live in a way that the people were probably living in that place before. So now they have to try to attack or take or harm to take care of their own needs. 

But if you build systems that take care of the needs of people, then you don’t have to worry about your safety because everyone is safe and cared for. But it’s not an individualized thing. If you really want to build safety, multi-generationally, [00:09:00] in a community that thrives on health and community and connection and nature and safety, then you just build systems that create that.

Eduardo: This brings us to the concept of, you cannot do this individually, right? This is not an individual exercise. So if it’s not individual, then it’s community. Now, there’s another contrast that comes to mind which is, leadership as we understand it, it’s a pyramid. The leader at the top is dictating and inspiring everybody, right? And the whole future hangs from this one guy at the top. Versus if you speak commons, if you speak community, what is the role of that? Is that even a leader or is this just a guide? And when I say “just”, not just, right, it’s like it’s guides versus leadership and then how those two things are different.

Ra: Yeah, I learned something very, very powerful recently that, you know, Maslow’s Pyramid of Hierarchy? [00:10:00] Physiological needs, and then it kind of works its way up to self-actualization. First of all, Maslow kept going past self-actualization, but they don’t teach that. He actually went to self-transcendence, which was beyond the ego, which is what we’re talking about. But Maslow actually took the pyramid idea from, I don’t know the actual name of what they call themselves, so I apologize for this. But the way that they’re referred to now is the Blackfoot people. 

He took this idea of the pyramid of hierarchy from them. It was actually modeled after a teepee, and he put self-actualization at the top of his pyramid. But actually, in the teepee, self-actualization is at the bottom because once you understand who you are, then you can start to benefit the community. So it’s actually flipped. But he took that idea from these people. 

And in this same way, what is a leader? When I was living in Cameroon, I had the blessing to go out to some of these villages when I was living and working out there with the farmers. [00:11:00] And I got to meet a lot of chiefs, like traditional chiefs from the Buntu people and other different groups.

And as you said, it was more of a guidance. It was not this hierarchical bottleneck of making decisions. The chief would actually allow the entire village, specific people who are allotted to express an opinion, to represent egalitarian views of the different parts of the village. They would come in and express, and then after everyone expressed in a circular discussion, no one is interrupting and crossing each other over. When that’s been expressed, then the Chief shares. 

The way that I view leadership is in the way that a conductor conducts a band. First of all, the conductor has to know who plays what instrument. So in order for that to happen, the conductor has to understand the gifts of the people with who he’s working with in order for that to happen. There have to be systems in place to cultivate the gifts [00:12:00] of the musicians.

And right now a lot of the standardization of the education system, which is built upon functioning for the Industrial Revolution, flattens the gifts of other people by fitting them into a specific way to plug into the economy. As Einstein says, if you’re to go to teach a fish how to swim, it’s going to really succeed. But if you go to teach a fish how to climb a tree like a squirrel, it’s going to fail. If the systems are not cultivating the gifts of the musicians because they’re trying to turn all the fish into squirrels, then the conductor is going to have no way to actually cultivate the gifts of the musicians. So once you can actually have the gifts of the musicians and have systems that cultivate these gifts and find them or those that can see them and help to cultivate them, then all the conductor does is highlight the gifts of the musicians in the orientation of beautiful harmony. [00:13:00] So this is what harmony means, right? We’re like, oh, we want to achieve and live in harmony. Well, harmony is a musical term. So how do you live in harmony? A harmony exists within the band. The harmony exists with the different ways that the music can play together to create a beautiful movie in life, giving a piece of music.

So for me, that’s really what the leader is, and that’s what I’ve seen being in different places as the leaders actually just cultivate the gifts of others and they help to coalesce collective ideas into the best applicable approach for that moment in time. And they also set up structures to prevent dominance. Like this is one of the things that I found the most interesting from learning in these different places is that dominance is a disease for the tribe.

Narcissism is a disease for the tribe because if you think that you’re better than the other people who you’re in community with, you’re going to cause a lot of disruption. [00:14:00] So there are methods of making sure that you don’t do that. There are methods to make sure that dominant views and narcissism don’t arise. And what’s happening now is we’re actually manufacturing narcissism. You know, we’re manufacturing individualism. 

And in this book, Sand Talk, which is an amazing book by Tyson Yunkaporta, he talks about the Stone knife fight. And this was something where if two people got into an argument or some sort of quarrel, they’d have to fight with these stone knives and you have to get the other person’s back. You’d have to, like, try to cut them on the back. And then whoever won, right, whoever cut the person the most on the back, whoever lost that would then get to cut the person who won’s back all of the same times that their back got cut. 

So basically, even if you won, it didn’t matter because you then got cut in the same way that you cut the person who you beat. [00:15:00] And that’s a way to make sure that you don’t think that you’re some high and mighty person who is better than the community because you’re better with that. When you harm someone like that, you’re harmed right back. It’s equal. It’s not dominant. This is what leadership is about. Leadership’s about cultivating the “we” and it’s throughout time. It’s literally throughout time. This is probably like ten, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 years old. I don’t know how old the practices are within the original communities in Australia, not the Aboriginal, but the original, right? Because they’re the original people. I don’t know why their name is Aboriginal.

Eduardo: Here there’s another concept, another contrast, right? Within competition and collaboration and arguably in economics, schools, and business school, they teach us about… Competition is good, but there’s competition just like the survival of the fittest out in nature. How do you contrast these two terms and overcome this tendency to dominate, to favor collaboration?

Ra: [00:16:00] Survival of the fittest. It’s kind of an interesting one, right? Because it’s actually a survival of the most adaptive. It’s not necessarily the fittest. This whole, like, evolutionary biology thing that Darwin did, I think we’ve misinterpreted it because the survival of the fittest, doesn’t actually function like that. It’s the survival of the being that helps to feed the ecosystem in the best way. So once again, it’s about the ecosystem. 

Like the herring in Sitka, when I had the blessing of going and sitting with the Tlingit people and in  Sheet’k’á Kwáan. Which is known as Sitka. And I was learning about the herring there. And the herring are like the keystone of that entire environment because all the other animals eat them, the people eat them, the birds drop them off into the forests and they decompose in the actual forest.

So the herring survived, right? The herring thrived. But is that the fittest? Why are they the fittest? They’re not at the top of the food chain. [00:17:00] What are they? They live in a way that proliferates life in the environment. 

So their survival is dependent upon the ability of everything else in the ecosystem to thrive. Because if that thrives, then they’ll thrive because the whales aren’t just going to go and whoop, eat all the herring. Oh, whales are competing with the seals today. Whales eat all the herring, seals get none. That’s not how nature works. It’s not competitive like that. A wolf doesn’t go and eat all the food, so then all the other animals die. That’s the way that we view competition, right? But it’s not like that. Everything is working together naturally. That’s how ecosystems function. 

So the survival of the fittest is really a misnomer in the way that I view it because it’s the survival of the most adaptive or survival of that which creates the most life inside of the ecosystem itself. So I think that really, [00:18:00] that helps us towards moving into collaboration a lot more because if we can function to lift up the lives of other people around us, well then naturally they’re going to help us function by helping to lift up our life as well. And that’s what collaboration is. This is what the gift economy is based on. 

One of the Lakota values is “generosity is the highest form of courage.” Think about that. Think about that as the opposite of competition and accumulation. Generosity is the highest form of courage. I’ve experienced this in my life. I’ll gladly give people, if I have extra anything, I’ll give it.

I was in Haiti one time, in Haiti, and it was pouring rain. I was walking in the mountains and this guy needed a shirt and he’s like, Can I have your shirt? I was just like, off my back. Gave it to him. I don’t need a shirt because I believe someone else will give me a shirt if I need one. Right. If I give you something, there’s no guarantee because there’s not the world you have. 

Generosity is the highest form of courage for someone else to [00:19:00] give me something if I need it, if I give it to you. So all of a sudden, we’re isolated again into individuals. But if you actually bring back that precept of generosity is the highest form of courage, then you could give anyone anything because you’ll naturally be giving something back in return to help you to thrive because you’re helping other people to thrive. So that’s collaboration.

Eduardo: If you look at biomimicry, there’s a lot of new knowledge, well, new old knowledge, right? Of integrating the biomimicry principle into new designs of systems. We also observe their collaboration, right? When collaboration happens, looking at nature, both species grow and win, and in this competition of some sort, both lose in the long run. So it’s interesting. Just by observing nature, this becomes so central.

Ra: [00:20:00] I want to add something about that statement, because I was just thinking about wolves and sheep, and it might appear that they’re competing, but really the wolves are helping to keep the sheep healthy, right? Sheep with genetic issues or sick or dying. The wolf will kind of cull that back and it will keep it keep the sheep healthy, right?

The sheep have to run and sprint if a wolf’s chasing them, right? It keeps them healthy, it keeps them alert, and it keeps them living in the way that they’re meant to live. So an example of biomimicry in this regard is like, now what we’ve done is we put fences around our sheep, right? So the sheep just kind of don’t have to worry about anything because the wolf and the foxes and stuff have a harder time getting in.

But now humans haven’t begun to imitate the wolf or the fox. [00:21:00] The sheep are getting less and less healthy and less and less wild, right? They’re becoming domesticated because we haven’t taken up the role of what we eliminated in nature, which is the wolf. So things evolve. Biomimicry in this way relates to competition and could be viewed in that way. How are we taking the wild and domesticating it and why are we not reacting to create or rewild the thing that we’re domesticating? Because that’s us taking away nature’s job and then not doing it. 

But biomimicry outside of that, I mean, has a wide variety of functions and there are a lot of really, really cool innovations that I’ve seen with biomimicry. One that I remember that I thought was so cool was, I think it was in Japan. One of the designers for the train went and observed a bunch of different birds that were diving in the water. And he noticed, like the way that the birds’ beaks were shaped when they would dive in the water and how they could just like cut right through the water. [00:22:00] And then he designed the train after the bird’s beak so that it became a lot more aerodynamic and required a lot less fuel and energy and all this sort of stuff because he, like, designed the train after the beak, right? That would be an example of biomimicry. Just to be able to witness the genius of the natural world and then utilize that in our designs.

Eduardo: And back to the concept of collaboration. I think there’s something often overlooked and say, okay, well, humans are distrusting. That’s a misconception I think, looking at collaboration. The development of modern society as we see it today. I think that it’s only the result of structures collaborating with each other. 

So the ability to trust that when you go to the supermarket, you go buy the banana and you’re not going to get poisoned with it, is a deep sign of trust, right? [00:23:00] And the trust is embedded in all sorts of mechanisms. We don’t bet on everything that we’re consuming like I’m drinking my coffee now, and I trust that the supply chain, it’s going to provide safe coffee. And so I believe that the potential is evidently there. But there are some aspects, that we have decided, just to ignore. I’m just going into this lack of collaboration or competition, right? Against, when we talk about big walls between countries and borders and separation as opposed to unity. So there’s potential to have faith that there’s a way to exploit the innate ability to trust.

Ra: I think trust actually needs to erode or decompose before we can actually truly learn how to build systems of trust. And I think that a lot of people are actually beginning to build them yet simultaneously. There’s a lot where we just still blindly trust in corporations’ [00:24:00] intentions of how we should live or what they’re providing for us. And I think that that trust really needs to erode. And I think it is eroding pretty rapidly right now in the world as well, which is why, we can witness it right there, right? That’s why decomposition is key because there’s trust in these corporations and their intentions erode. It brings back responsibility to us to grow better organizations. So right there, we get to witness the life cycle of how important it is for decomposition.

Eduardo: I wanted to contrast another set of concepts that we have alluded to, and that is wisdom versus knowledge versus intelligence. How do you see these three concepts?

Ra: I’ll start with the wisdom, and knowledge of knowledge. Knowledge is our concepts, right?

A lot of theory, for example, [00:25:00]  in universities, you’re taught a lot of theoretical stuff. Theories on organizational leadership, theories on this, theories on that. But wisdom is knowledge that’s been transmuted into experience. So, you know it’s real. It’s been tested and the deeper the wisdom, the deeper the time of testing. So for me, the deepest wisdoms are those that have been tested over deep time. For me, that would be the deepest wisdoms. 

One of my teachers, Rudy Xochipillihe, talks about how Western philosophy is all about thinking. He’s like, native philosophy… We didn’t think about it. We just did it. Native philosophy was lived. It wasn’t thought about. It wasn’t a concept. He’s like, what am I going to write about something before I live it?

I’ll live it first. [00:26:00] And then I’ll learn that it works and then maybe I’ll talk about it. But why am I going to just propose a theory that has no rootedness in function and then act like that’s the truth? So I think a lot of the knowledge that we have is just theoretical, just conceptual. 

Even in social media now, we see wisdom becoming an opinion. And what that really means is that people go sit in one plant medicine ceremony and now they think that they’re a shaman. People go learn one thing and then they propose it as wisdom and try to contradict something that’s in yogic philosophy that’s been there for 10,000 years. That’s not how it works, you know? That’s just spewing opinion.

So wisdom is something that is rooted in experience. It’s experiential sciences, It’s a ways of living. It’s a life way, not a lifestyle. And this is really, really important. Everything we’re doing now is about lifestyles, right? Oh, the way you dress. Oh, that’s a lifestyle brand. What does that even mean? I don’t want to live in a life lifestyle. [00:27:00] It’s life. It’s a life way. And the way that you live your life should be harmonious with life. So I think this is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. 

This knowledge is just a concept that hasn’t been transmuted and tested through experience in a deep time understanding, which is where I view wisdom as. And wisdom, the roots are a lot deeper, right?

It’s a lot less shakeable. Wisdom, for example, there are things you just can’t ignore. We eat food. That’s wisdom, right? So the wisdom would be, don’t harm your soil. That’s wisdom because you eat food to live. It’s that simple, right? Get around that one. Come to me with some knowledge to tell me about how I don’t need to eat food or treat my soil well. You can’t do it. You can come in with fertilizers. You can come in with all of this stuff. It’s not going to matter. The end result is that you eat food and I eat food. And if we harm the soil, we don’t eat food. [00:28:00] That’s wisdom. Wisdom is simple. It’s also complex in its understanding. And the way that you can learn and work with the natural world. But it’s clear, you know? 

So intelligence, I think, is something that is the essence of the way that energy is delivered information, right? We have the word ‘information’, but that’s just intelligence in a specific form. So in formation. So when the intelligence comes in and it’s received, you then have the ability to then utilize your experience to move that information into a life way. So every single thing contains intelligence. That’s really what consciousness is. Everything is intelligent, from the grass to me to the tree, to the bird, to anything. It’s all made of intelligence. [00:29:00] Nature is intelligence. God. Another word for God is intelligence, natural intelligence. So to utilize the intelligence to then live in a beautiful way, would be wisdom. To take the intelligence and create something compartmentalized or theoretical in concept, that could maybe be knowledge.

Another part of wisdom is that it has to be interconnected with everything. Knowledge can be compartmentalized, but wisdom is interconnected. So I’d say that these are some of the differences between these words.

Eduardo: That speaks to a vision of the future. You speak about building a future that has three components in it or three characteristics. Purposeful, kincentric, and regenerative. Can you unpack these three concepts for us, [00:30:00] and put them in perspective of how you see the future we need to build?

Ra: I just did a TED Talk on purpose in Ireland. It was called Why You’ll Never Find Your Purpose. And Why I titled it that was because it’s not something that we find, it’s something that already is here, right? When you look up the word purpose, it comes from P U R P U S, purpose, and it means aim, intention, or proper function for which something exists.

So we’re humans, and the word human means ground or soil. So what’s our purpose as humans, or what’s the proper function for which a being of the ground or the soil exists? Well, the proper function would be to cultivate and keep that harmonious and intact. So our purpose is actually not about us. Our purpose is about life. So for something to be purposeful, it needs to function upon the theorizing of life.

[00:31:00] So if you’re doing something that is assisting with life, thriving, being creative, abundant, ecosystemic, interconnected, beautiful. Any of these things that’s very purposeful, right? Eventually, you can get to the point when you fully get out of your way, you can realize that life is purpose. Those are synonyms for me, life and purpose. They’re the same thing. Life is purposeful in itself. So we’re a part of life. We live with life. We live with planet Earth, not on planet Earth. So purpose is understanding that you’re then living in that way. 

Kincentric, kincentric means that you understand the deep, interconnected relationality between you and all of life. You view that way. You live that way. [00:32:00] You go to cut down a tree, put an offering. You’re taking something, give something back. That’s simple, right? To be kincentric, to live in kinship. That understanding naturally, when you feel that way, when you know that on an embodied level, not that you think it because people are like, Oh, everything’s one, right? And then they’ll go and they’ll kick dust on some homeless person on the street and they’re like, Oh, it’s all one.

You just kicked dust on that person. Well, it’s all one. It’s not all one if you think you’re separate from the one, you know. So kincentric is understanding that and living in the fact that we’re all connected and equal here. It’s not hierarchical, like humans are better than sharks, you know, eagles are better than hummingbirds. 

Kincentric is egalitarian. [00:33:00] And within that uniqueness and the unity of egalitarianism comes the uniqueness where each entity can thrive and live in its own function because the unit of frameworks can only function in uniqueness. So kincentric is about this and regenerative is just natural. Nature isn’t sustainable, it’s regenerative. Sustainability is kind of like a funny concept because everything naturally regenerates itself and enables life to function in and around and with it.

So regeneration for me, it’s most applied right now to agriculture, but regeneration is energy. It’s one of the directions, you know, regeneration is really a result of living a purposeful and kincentric life, which is why I organize them in that way. Because if you live in kinship, understand that your purpose is to create more life. Then you’re going to build regenerative things. [00:34:00] You’re going to create regeneratively. You can’t create regeneratively if you view yourself hierarchically from something else, because you’re going to funnel your energy and allocate that towards your own benefit. Outside of the benefit of the kin network, which is not purposeful because it then detracts from life. So naturally, these kind of funnel into each other like that.

Eduardo: My perception is that the toughest concept to get through is the concept of kinship and kincentric. Because it has been embedded in our culture that humans are truly the center. Humans are the center. Humans are the pinnacle of creation. We are made in the image of God. [00:35:00] It’s a deeply rooted belief. How do we come around that when that’s almost in the DNA of modern culture?

Ra: Another thing that Rudy shared with me is that the word culture comes from the word cultivation. They come from the same root word. So we’re actually right now not living in a culture. We’re living in a pseudo-culture because it’s not rooted in Earth wisdom. It’s not rooted in natural law.

Eduardo: Like, indigenous languages, from what I realized, first of all, they emerge from the place where the people lived right? They didn’t come up here and they’re not like… “fork”. They don’t just create a word like a fork. The language is created from the place with sounds and understandings in the way that things are interconnected, and most of the languages are verbs, which means that they’re living, right?

Ra: The majority of the words in English are nouns, [00:36:00] which are objects which are inanimate. So naturally, our worldview is one of non-kincentrism, and when we objectify the living world into an inanimate object, so already with the way that we’re viewing the world through our language, we’re blocking, we’re freezing reality. Even the word “life” in English, if you look it up, it’s a noun. And your name is a noun.

Are you a noun? Are you a frozen object? No. You’re living. You’re going through the natural rhythms of life. Right? So already the way that we’re learning a language, with English, for example, is blocking us off into anthropocentrism, which is human centricity. But how can humans be at the center of life when all of life existed before humans?

[00:37:00] And how can humans be at the center of life if we’re relying upon life to live? How can it be all about us? We’re without water, we die, you know? How can we be the most intelligent species if we need to eat salmon to live? Why are we the most intelligent? What does that mean? Do you think intelligent species destroy their home? I would have to say no. People tell me all the time the issue can be solved with their brainpower, and intellect. I’m like, No, I think that’s actually what got us in. The problem here is we rely too much on the brain and the mind, and we don’t rely enough on the heart and the core. It’s not that we’re not intelligent enough, it’s just that the way that we view intelligence is off.

Because I tell you one thing. I mean, the bears don’t go into the forest and destroy the forest, but yet we’re so intelligent and we destroy our home. It doesn’t feel intelligent to me, it feels like a little child in a temper tantrum against the mother trying to get what it wants, which is just some love. But the love’s all here, right? Water is love. [00:38:00] Talk about something unconditional. You want to know about unconditional love? Learn from water. It doesn’t matter if you’re Donald Trump, doesn’t matter if you have $1 in your bank account, you can drink water and water will help. Water is the ultimate medicine. And the way that we treat water is the way that we treat women. And there are all of these connections about everything that’s happening here.

So the one thing to know about kinship is if you think you’re the center, start to take away the things that give you life and let me know if you’re still at the center. 

Eduardo: Are you still superior, right?

Ra: Yeah, it feels that simple, really. And maybe it’s just a place that I’m at with, how I’m viewing the world now and living. But it’s not rocket science. It’s a very simple equation. You are given food, you grow food. Plant a seed back in the ground. You eat fruit, put the seed back. Right? That’s a circle. That’s what a resource is. [00:39:00] If you eat the fruit and you throw it in the landfill, it’s not a resource, it’s a source. You didn’t even re it. You didn’t resource it back into the ground. It’s just a circle, you know? So naturally that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. We get life, we put life back. We are given something, you put your good energy back. 

We are doing this. We’re doing that. Like just, we’re doing it already. Right now. We’re breathing. You breathe in, you breathe out. That’s reciprocity. One of my uncles from the Tongva Chumash nation, he’s like, “Ra, when we’re born, we make an agreement with life. That agreement’s with our first breath in. The agreement is that we breathe back out in reciprocity. If you don’t like that rule, try not to breathe for a while.” That’s it. That’s kincentrism right there. Understand that your breath comes from billions of years of the respiration of algae trees and various other beings, [00:40:00] and that we’re breathing the same breath, the same air that they’re breathing on all the other side of the world, and that your great great, great grandmother, she breathe the same air that we’re breathing in. You know?

Eduardo: How do you package all this, Ra? I mean, you have created a couple of companies or initiatives to help bring this forth, all these learnings, right? And form new leaders, and create awareness. What’s the mission and purpose you have around (re)Biz and Future Elders?

Ra: One thing that I’ve done is I’m not trying to create thought leaders. I’m trying to create thought rememberers. You know? I don’t think there need to be more thought leaders charging their way across the galaxy trying to innovate and be new like that. We need people to remember here, you know, we need thought rememberers. So this is kind of what Future Elders is about. 

Future Elders is for elders in training. [00:41:00] It’s for people who are interested in learning the depth of wisdom that they’re able to live and rebalance life on planet Earth. To actually become a keystone in community, to become an ancestor worth descending from as Martin Prechtel says.

So Future Elders is eight weeks and each of the eight weeks is different topics, and eight elders are coming in from around the world to share on those topics. And we have active discussions. There’s written content. Basically what this is doing is it’s an un-school. So what I mean by that is, one of my favorite quotes from Einstein is “Education happens once you’ve forgotten everything you’ve learned in school.”

So Future Elders is about unlearning all of the things that prevent us from truly remembering wisdom and living in that way. Because the goal isn’t to just have wisdom, concepts that you can spew out at all points, [00:42:00] even though that might impress some girl at a bar, that’s not what it’s for, you know? What wisdom is for us to be lived in a way that creates more life for the future generations who have yet to be blessed to come and live in the way that we may have. So Future Elders is a continuation prayer. 

(re)Biz is a 31-day workshop about diving into the depths of the interconnected and holistic systems of how to build generative and post-growth economies and organizations and lives. Because as we briefly touched upon here, you can see how interconnected everything is, right? But rarely do we implement this understanding into how we build businesses, into how we think about solving problems, into how we understand creativity, into how anything. Right. 

[00:43:00] So (re)Biz is about taking this holistic understanding and the deeper nuances of what is being ignored on the majority of all organizational principles and leadership and infusing it back with that so that we can build truly regenerative organizations, not just something where your products are organic, but the entire value chain is creating thriving life that you’re actually doing what needs to be done, not what people want.

It’s really nice to produce shoes, but if I have six pairs of shoes, I don’t need more shoes, right? So we’ve even forgotten the difference between need and want. So we’re just building businesses for wants. We’re building 90 new integrations to Slack. When people don’t have clean water. So how do we actually build regenerative businesses? How do we actually do this and understand the depth and the layers that this goes? That’s what (re)Biz is about.

[00:44:00] And it brings in a degrowth, post-growth economics. It brings in regenerative design principles and biomimicry, it brings in grief. It brings in various different worldviews of kinship and principles and understandings of dominant worldview and grief. I mean, it goes into all of this because it’s all connected. The more that we disassociate our humanity from our business, that just deepens the separation.

We’re not machines. We can’t function in an infinite growth linear model like that. Time is not even linear. We’ve forgotten that. Like the amnesia is so deep. Think about what we shared earlier. We’re in the year 2022 because Jesus was born in the year zero. If you look at other calendars, right, it is nowhere close to what we say the year is, we don’t even know where we are in time. So this is the level of depth that we need to be putting into the way that we’re thinking about [00:45:00] creating organizations and businesses to create thriving life on Earth. Or else, I mean, we’re witnessing some of the repercussions now. So these are what two of these offerings are. And then if organizations actually need assistance in developing these outside of the content that I can share and in these actual reprograms, then that’s what Pueo is for.

Pueo is the Hawaiian word for owl. It represents ancestors and caring for life and humans and non-humans. The owl is a sign of ominous nature. A lot of cultures look at the owl as a warning.

Eduardo: Do you address the concept of business? Because business, as we understand it, is like it’s a machine to create wealth. Which is associated with all the things that we just discussed, right? The concept of business has to be rethought. What is a business? And what is the goal of creating a business? I see (re)Biz is perhaps, tell me, is it inception? [00:46:00] Is it like planting the seed for the future incubation of businesses? 

I even hesitate to call it a business because business and wealth creation are so stuck together. So there’s got to be some other term for an organization that is regenerative, an organization that thinks other than wealth creation. Yeah, feels like a new word. It feels like we only need a new word.

Ra: Yeah and this is why it’s (re)Biz, right? Re. And the word “business”, funnily enough, business and business are spelled the same way. You’re staying busy. You meet people too. It’s like, “How’s work?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s busy.” Oh, yeah, well, because it’s a business, a business. But we don’t need to stay busy like that. You know, we can do work. This is the difference between work and toil. Work clears the pathway so that other people don’t have to do that work over and over and over and over again.

[00:47:00] If you’re doing something that needs to be done over and over and over and over and over again, and you just keep doing it, that’s toil. That’s what the Buddhist calls Samsara. You’re just spinning around in a wheel. I think that a big part of all of this is like, how do we start redefining our language? Because maybe that’s not the right word anymore.

Eduardo: Right?

Ra: Right. There’s a lot there. And this was just kind of a, this was a brief taste.

Eduardo: That’s great. What is the value proposition for business leaders, I’m particularly interested in (re)Biz because that matches a lot with the audience that we’re going to be touching with this episode. What am I going to get out of (re)Biz?

Ra: The question that we framed (re)Biz around is [00:48:00] “What did you do once you knew about the state of the world?” So I would say that the majority of people who are in a business now, if they’re doing something, hopefully, they know what they’re doing, right. But once you realize what you’re doing and you see the state of the world, do you ignore it? Or what do you do once you know? So once you know something, you should probably act upon it if it needs to be repaired or restored or reconciled or healed. 

So what (re)Biz is for, is I’ve met so many people who have been in sustainability for years, ten, 20 years, and they’re like, I’ve never heard of any of the stuff that you’re saying. I didn’t learn that in my MBA studying sustainability. I’m like, “Yeah, because why would that be taught?” What’s the draw? 

The draw is to actually begin to understand the depth and nuance of what it means to truly be sustainable and move beyond sustainability, which is not a natural process, but to move into regeneration and even regeneration eventually gets to a point where it then hits the threshold that it balances itself out.

[00:49:00] So the whole point is to actually like, there’s this really funny thing, right? It’s like, economy or planet. Well…, economy. like, well, no economy if the planet goes, you know?

What’s the draw here? Okay, Well, do you want humanity to survive? Because if you actually want a business in the future, you should probably learn how to build a model of transition for your business to be future-ready and to enable the future because that’s where the actual business success is going to be anyway. Do you think the younger generations are going to want to come into your business if you’re just manipulating and polluting and extracting and have no purpose and have no impact or anything? No. Right? Right there, employee engagement and recruitment. 

Do you think your business is going to survive if it’s dependent upon a fragile supply chain that’s continually affected by macroeconomic issues and the global climate crisis? [00:50:00] No. You should probably diversify the way you think about the supply chain. All of these things are in it, right? To be able to look at the picture. That’s what (re)Biz is about. 

And then it helps to regenerate human resources, right? Why do you think human resources are burning out? Well, we’re burning out natural resources, too, right? So if it’s a human resource, what do you think burnout is? Burnout is excess extraction. So if a human is a resource in the same way that the land is a resource and we’re extracting upon the land until it’s depleted and we’re extracting upon the humans until they’re depleted, you think that humans are going to want to work for you anymore? We need to think about all of this, and this is really what (re)Biz focuses on.

Eduardo: What will be your call to action for business leaders?

Ra: If they listen to this podcast, that should be call of action enough.

Eduardo: Very good, Ra. How can people learn more about Future Elders and (re)Biz?

Ra: [00:51:00] You can find me on LinkedIn. Ra James Futureelders.co is the website for Future Elders and rebiz.io is the website for (re)Biz. There you’ll be able to get in touch with me. You’ll be able to see what the offerings are and I think that should be plenty.

Eduardo: Excellent. Well, it’s been great. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Ra: Sure.

Eduardo: So number one, top author or book.

Ra: Restoring the kinship worldview by Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez. 

Eduardo: Number two. What climate leader do you look up to or inspires you?

Ra: Vandana Shiva and Jason Hickel. I think they’re both pretty cool. I think Vandana is on a whole other level, but I’m really grateful for her and what she’s done to help preserve seeds. And I mean, everything she does is just incredible.

Eduardo: If you had a magic wand, what would you change or what problem you would fix today?

Ra: [00:52:00] I would just wave it over people like this and say, We are all a part of the Earth, so take care of her because she is you.

Eduardo: Number 4. Who do you think we need to have in the pod?

Ra: I think you should have Jason Hickel on the podcast if you can. He’s pretty epic. He talks a lot about degrowth and post-growth. You just got funded by the EU to do some research on degrowth. So.

Eduardo: And number five, do you think we’ll make it?

Ra: Depends on what you are calling “we”.

Eduardo: Will we humans? Because we Earth will make it.

Ra: Yeah I mean the earth will be fine, you know? The earth has been here a long time. Will we humans make it? It really depends. I mean, we have a choice. So it depends on who’s willing to step into the responsibility and the reciprocity of what it means to truly be a human. And if we are and we can do that, I think we have a chance. If we don’t, I mean, who knows? You know, I think eventually humans potentially come back again, Earth’s going to be here a lot longer, so.

Eduardo: [00:53:00] Some sort of human. Yeah, some sort of intelligent life, I’d say. Yeah. But that’s interesting. I mean, I just want to close with the content. When you asked, What do you mean by “we”, I think it’s critical for us to realize what you said, like, “Hey, you take an arm or a leg and you can still live.” But you take water or air or food for a few days and then you’re done. So when you say “we”, what is encompassed in the concept of “we”, right?

Ra: Yeah. Who are you? Who are you but water and food?

Eduardo: Exactly. It’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, Ra. It’s been a pleasure.

Ra: Yeah. Thank you.