Dr John Izzo

Using force to solve our problems is the very definition of the old paradigm.

And if we are going to emerge into a new system, if we are going to consciously evolve, then we need not to be doing that.

So this week we're talking to two people who spend their entire lives imagining how things might be different, particularly in the US, where even the pretense of democracy has quite clearly been abandoned.

Dr John Izzo is a friend of the podcast.

He was once an ordained minister in a Presbyterian church.

Now he's a best-selling author, speaker and thought leader focused on social responsibility and intergenerational integration.

He's a board member of the Elders Action Network and the Elders Climate Action Group

And most notably, in terms of what we're talking about here, he's co-host of the Way Forward Regenerative Conversations podcast, which is particularly focused at people over 50 who are interested in finding ways to a regenerative future.

And last April, so nearly a year ago, I heard him speaking to our second guest, Suzette Brooks Masters.

Suzette describes herself as a sometime Cassandra who sees around the corner.

She's a serial social entrepreneur with a long track record of creating positive change in our society on a wide range of issues.

She has a BA and a master's in economics from Amherst College and Cambridge, respectively.

And that's Cambridge in the UK, not one of the many in the US.

And she has a law degree from Harvard.

Even given all of that, she has spent a great deal of her working life as a strategist, working in the fields of expanding democracy.

And she is currently co-chair and co-founder of the Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance and an advisor to Assemble the Field.

And both of these are explicitly involved in finding new ways forward, new ways to shape a genuinely democratic system to replace the kleptocracy that we have at the moment.

It is a foundational axiom of this podcast that we have the best democracy that money can buy and that this is not a good thing.

And apart from the fact that it means we need to change the entire economic system, it also means we need to change our governance model.

We need a whole new way of doing politics, of imagining how to bring power to those with wisdom and, if remotely possible, wisdom to those with power, although I kind of doubt the second one is ever going to happen.