Onwrd

In this conversation, we connect with Aviv Shalgi, founder of Solar Simplified, an exciting example of win-win-win thinking applied to the energy industry. By matching renters, homeowners, and small businesses who care about the environment and want to save money on their electricity bill with local solar farms through an easy and transparent signup process, Solar Simplified is making renewable energy accessible to all.

It’s entrepreneurs like Aviv who are creating the “new normal” we’ve all been talking about for the last year. This type of win-win-win system design should inform how we approach the myriad of system disconnects we seek to mend in the months and years ahead.

As we race into the greater recession, or depression, and the rules and tools we have taken as constant disintegrate, we are presented with an amazing opportunity - to invent systems that are stronger, more just - to shift our understanding of what value is and how it is transferred and to reimagine what governance means in a global, and digital context.

Today’s guest lives on the vanguard of community, currency and governance. Through her work and life, she forwards possibilities of a more liberated future and helps leaders bring their audacious visions to life. In this episode, we ask some big questions and explore exciting solutions with Grace Rachmany of DAO Leadership.

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By intentionally designing our processes and systems to reward the behaviors we want, we can more quickly create the outcomes we seek. Times are changing, and the time is ripe to re-establish, reinvent and rejigger the processes we rely on to move the world forward.
Today we connect with Pool Together, a decentralized finance protocol that is creating healthy savings habits, and breaking bad fiscal management by providing upfront incentives and removing psychological and technological barriers to good, longterm individual financial hygiene.

Pool Together is one exciting example that serves as a model of how simple tweaks can support big behavioral shifts towards a more sane, stable and sustainable future. To experience how Pool Together is creating healthier saving habits go to your App Store and download a Status wallet, then click 2 times to find Pool Together and begin to experience the benefits of a no-loss lottery!

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When it comes to housing, the challenge we face is not an imbalance of housing supply and demand, but a gross misallocation of our housing resources. How many homes do you have? How many empty rooms are in your home(s)? On your street? In your city?

Map this fact on top of a growing elderly population, with low to high needs for support - everything from grocery shopping, to companionship, to homecare sertvices. Many times, our seniors find themselves land rich and cash poor.

Between the abundance of rooms and the growing needs of the people in those homes, an elegant, win-win-win solution is emerging. Home shares. Today I sit down with the founder of SHARE California, an organization that matches individuals needing housing with housed senior needing varying degrees of support. SHARE uses high tech and high touch to deliver a shockingly nimble approach that is producing BIG results

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Before we were mandated to stay isolated, many of us struggled with a lack a connection - to self, our culture, our families, our friends, our purpose and environments. This lack of connection is at the root of many of our mental health challenges, that present as anxiety, cutting, bullying, school shootings, depression, obsession, addiction, suicide and the myriad of other mental health challenges me, you and our neighbors battle daily.

As the mental health conversation becomes more important, psychologists, therapists and self-care practitioners are beginning to understand the importance of cultural compatible interventions to better serve the populations they seek to support. One example that I am particularly excited about is the use of hip-hop to help youth understand, expand, express to erect a better future. Today we are in conversation with the founders of Rhythmic Mind, a Hip-Hop Therapy organization, serving teens and Transitional Age Youth in the greater Bay Area.

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What does ownership mean in a digital age? As our lives move more virtual, answering this question becomes very important. Questions of authenticity, of history, and of piracy.

Blockchain technologies inherent transparency, veracity, and decentralized, baked into the infrastructure, make it uniquely applicable to the facilitation of managing, transferring and interacting with your digital possessions. And, of course, you guessed it, someone is out there making that possible right now.

These blockchain projects support a growing universe of something called NTF’s, and I quote, “Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique, digital items with blockchain-managed ownership. Examples include collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and even ownership records for physical assets.”

Today I am talking with the creator of one of the largest marketplace for buying, selling, and discovering rare digital items. I present Devin Finzer, creator of Open Sea.

At the root of many social problems communities face the world over, at any scale, lay finances. Our financial services are inefficient, obfuscated and inaccessible. To respond to the pains and constraints we face regarding accessing and using money, a growing cohort of social innovators are building more accessible, fair and transparent financial services. 

Today, we learn about a completely decentralized capital market, built on the Ethereum blockchain, called "Maple Finance." Maple lays the groundwork for crypto banks by giving DeFi users access to bond funding fast at low cost, and creating a flexible suite of lending tools for loaners and borrowers.

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There is a rising suit of tools that allow people the world over to begin doing things with their money that has previously been impossible. As blockchain tools begin to grow up, we are seeing a creative explosion of possibilities as people begin to program money.

One tools that we have mentioned a few times in recent episodes is DAI. D.A.I. DAI is a tool from the company, Maker. DAI is a dollar backed token that lets holders of this token make steady and passive gains. rDAI, an offshoot of DAI, was built to give people a chance to automatically allocate accrued interest to a recipient of your choice. In short, this tool makes it possible to accrue and contribute interest from your cash assets.

A very exciting use case of rDAI is being forwarded with charitable ends, and today I am stoked to sit down with Victor of rTrees, a tool that sends your accrued interest to a charity that plants trees. This is just the latest example of how blockchain tech is being used and experimented with to create a more sane, just and sustainable economy.

Great work places inspire hope, foment change and are fertile grounds for creative thinking. Great work places and organizations are too far and few in between. Enspiral is changing that by ensuring their clients and partners are practicing effective patterns of collaboration.

As we start this next decade, societies around the world seem to be at an inflection point, and new solutions are needed to the new challenges we face. Old tools and tricks are no longer sufficient.

That is why Enspiral, a network of people working on stuff that matters, with the mission to support people to do the same, strives to make work more humane, more collaborative and more sustainable.

By approaching our work, our passions and one another in novel ways, new solutions can be uncovered, new possibilities unleashed and new patterns created. In this episode, I chat with John Gieryn, Catalyst at Enspiral to explore the what, how and why of the work of Enspiral.

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The economy is rapidly evolving - we just had the highest highs, followed by unprecedented volatility. This combined with the fact that we enjoy a global workforce, interconnected by interdependent central banking systems, makes all of us vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of economic whims, worries and wonders. In this new economy, workers are more mobile, transitory, have more options and incur more risk than we have become accustomed to. this means we need new tools to support the workers, consultants, freelancers, distributed teams, service providers and vendors who make the important work we do possible. Luckily, a cohort of entrepreneurs are focusing on solving the problems related to supporting the emerging workforce operate in alignment with the realities of modern life.

Today I am talking to Paul, founder of Sablier. This tools makes possible real-time payments (i.e. you to get paid for each interval of work you perform). This means no more waiting around for the 1st and 15th! Sablier is the latest DeFi service, currently being forwarded to create a more just, sane and sustainable economy.

Marshall McLuhan once wrote, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Consider how the internet has shaped reality in less than a quarter century. While human’s are great at creating tools, we have a shockingly poor ability to understand the implication of our tools when the world takes hold of them. I share all this as context as we enter the unknown and race to build tools to solve today’s problems. I continue to find hope and inspiration in the burgeoning blockchain space. People unconstrained by borders, regulations, and technological barriers - building tools to solve some of the largest most fundamental challenges society faces. But as McLuhan warns us, we create tools, then the tools create us. So, today I am excited to enter into a conversation with a blockchain platform that is building their tools with humans at the center - carefully considering the implications and impacts of their tools, not simply building fancy functions and mind boggling buttons.

Today we’re in conversation with Status. Status is a completely open source community, created by contributors all over the world. Developers, designers, creators, educators, hobbyists, enthusiasts, and more – everyone has free and open access to add, edit, review and contribute to the platform. Status strives to be a secure communication tool that upholds human rights, enables community money, forwards community law and through privacy, preserves culture. Join me as we continue our journey, learning about social innovations with Jonny Zerah of Status

In the face of this, a new bread of entrepreneur is emerging with the aims of decentralizing financial services and increasing the transparency, autonomy and validity of economic systems. The movement goes by the name, DeFi (as in decentralized finance).

To realize this vision of decentralizing central banks and their bevvy of obfuscated services, a new relationship with data is required. The new relationship with data finds its foundation in blockchains, and it is now time to begin taking this technology serious. In the coming weeks, I am taking a deep dive into the exciting world of DeFi as this will likely be the first space that blockchain technology begins to impact the masses, and improve society en mass.

Today I sit down with the lead of Zero Collateral, a protocol for decentralized lending. Through this platform, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, anyone has the opportunity to become a lender or borrower. This is a way for people to secure short-term loans and be the collateralized of these loans. This model has the potential to decrease the financial burden of short-term loans, decrease the barriers of accessing a loan, and allowing anyone with capital to provide a safe loan, make some interest on their money along the way.

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Media has always played a pivotal role in shifting the patterns we seek to change. New stories help cultures shift behaviors, patterns and potentially bring about long-sought-after changes.

So how can we shift the narratives around some of our most entrenched social ills? Two innovators are working on that. In this episode, we meet Eric Ortiz, a journalist, and Chaumtoli Huq, a lawyer and much more. These two have created a newsroom unlike any other and are striving to elevate the stories of the most marginalized. In this conversation, we hear the how, why and what of this bottom-up approach to shifting narratives.

John McAfee is a visionary, mogul, fugitive, presidential candidate, entrepreneur, a true one of a kind. In this episode John and I discuss why he is running for President of the USA in 2020, love, literature, arrest records and more.

Cell phone ubiquity is inhibiting us all from communicating and connecting in the ways we strive to be with one another. It has reached a fever pitch and I am more aware of their negative effects now more than ever. Leaving aside the impact of these devices on our youth (e.g. cyber bullying), our cultural addiction to these devices is getting in the way of our ability to have our basic needs met - feeling acknowledged by others and being connected to something larger than ourselves.

Luckily, an emerging cadre of social innovators is working to remove social media and phone over-usage and replace it with human connection - that incredible tool that helped us survive millions of years and make astonishing advances.

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Simmons of Yondr, a company working to create phone-free spaces for artists, educators, organizations and individuals.

Creativity, autonomy, localism, and customization are just a few of the dominant trends of the 21st Century, so it is no surprise that we are seeing the rise of 3D printing.

As more maker spaces, teen centers, science clubs and libraries getting a hold of these relatively inexpensive home-based custom manufacturing machines, we are seeing more and more creative and impactful applications of these small devices. But these small tools, trinkets, and toys being printed have their limitations due to the size of the printers. Not for long.

In this episode, I sit down with Samantha Snabes, founder of re:3d - a company that is taking an inovative approach to the development and deployment of industrial-sized 3D printers.

We have more communication tools than ever before, yet our ability to communicate with one another seems to be deteriorating. Is it the medium or the message that is becoming harder to navigate?

Communication is the most powerful tool we have to solve and resolve our problems. But look around, there is a pandemic of toxic communication, inhibiting productive communication.

In the eye of this worrisome storm, I sit down with Anthony Law, the founder of Gaugr. Anthony and his team are working to evolve our ability to communicate beyond the binary, past the troll and get us back to a place of healthy interactions - interpersonally, professionally and globally.

Our health system tends to focus on drugs, diseases, doctors, and disorders, yet it is our daily habits and community that have a far greater impact on our health outcomes than the healthcare conversation tends to acknowledge. In this episode, I sit down with a revolutionary non-profit who is changing how health and community can connect to create better outcomes for all - insurers, individuals, those battling illnesses and those interested in food.

We discuss inspiring trends, developments, and initiatives that can shift the US' healthcare model and improving health outcomes, today.

Entrepreneurship is at an all-time high. More creative risk-takers are bucking traditional employment and creating their own jobs, pursuing their passions and solving major problems at every scale, on every continent. But, becoming an entrepreneur is tough, and even tougher for those who the economy has historically left behind.

Luckily, there are business savvy leaders with giants hearts, big visions, and enormous commitments leading efforts to ensure everyone has the opportunity to change the world, make a living and create good jobs. In this episode, we talk to Elizabeth Gore and learn how she and her colleagues are increasing opportunities and the ability for entrepreneurs of all stripes to succeed.