Bernard Lietaer, author of New Money for a New World, is an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems. He has studied and worked in the field of money for more than 30 years in an unusually broad range of capacities including as a Central Banker, a fund manager, a university professor, and a consultant to governments in numerous countries, multinational corporations, and community organizations.

Here in this 3 minute clip, Bernard speaks on what he refers to as Yin and Yang currencies and that “it’s time to create a balanced view.”

Bernard will be presenting via Skype at the upcoming Money & Life 2012 event at the Whidbey Institute. For more information click here. We hope you can join us for what promises to be an exciting and engaging event.

Just received this info on a new film, Money and Life, and want to share it with you because of its importance to this moment in our evolution. It is a continuation of the thinking of Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics…

John Fullerton is Founder and President of Capital Institute, a transdisciplinary collaborative space dedicated to exploring and effecting economic change. The Institute’s mission is to help create “a more just, resilient, and sustainable way of living on this earth through the transformation of finance.”

In our candid interview with John, he shared his own transformative journey that lead him from Wall Street, where he managed capital markets worldwide at JP Morgan, to establishing himself as a thought leader in the “new economy” space.

In this 5 minute clip, John speaks soberly yet with optimism about the immense challenge of our time: the biospheric reality that is forcing us to re-think economics as we have known it, which is as John states “essentially our religion today.”

Watch, listen, comment and share!

John Fullerton: The Biospheric Reality from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

And here is another clip with David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule and Agenda for a New Economy.

David Korten: Walking Away From the King from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

Here is the trailer for the wonderful film these clips are taken from.

Money & Life trailer from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

The producer and director of Money & Life, Katie Teague, is seeking $50,000 to complete this important documentary that demystifies and questions the broken institution of money. No small undertaking. The heart of her message is that debt creates scarcity and her film is an empowering wake up call to end the vicious cycle and liberate us and money from its capitalist constraints so we can celebrate abundance instead and co-create a system that serves people and the planet. And, as you can see, through her interviews, she is touching on the soul of the issue with intelligence and compassion.

“My hope is that we can create an economy where we can do what we love, where we can be rewarded for doing what we love,” Teague said. “It’s idealistic, but it’s only limited by saying it’s impossible. The movie shows that money is a human artifact. It doesn’t grow on trees or fall from the sky. “We created it, and over time it’s changed. We are living in a time of significant shift. Things change and the main institution that needs to change in our lifetimes is money.”

Please join me in helping Katie complete her project.

To read a great story on Katie and her film and ideas, click here.

REMEMBER, TO WATCH THE CLIPS CLICK ON THE YELLOW LINK TO NPD’S WEBSITE.

As all of have been made painfully aware, happiness is an inside job. We make ourselves happy and buying toys and eating food only delays dealing with deeper issues. At the same tine, the worldwide economic crises brought on by over borrowing by governments and the resultant austerity programs foisted on their citizens is both repugnant and immoral.

This is the time to turn around the economic game so it works for all of us rather than the 1%.

From the producers of The Economics of Happiness DVD which will be the subject of a review in February and whose trailer appears below comes a March Conference dedicated to the same theme. Bringing together some of the greatest economic visionaries of our time who collectively are redefining economics so that it serves people and the planet, the conference will be held from March 23-25 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California.

Conference themes include Breaking Down the Old Economy, Small Scale on a Large Scale, Local Futures and Reweaving the Fabric of Hope.

Among the stellar international group of presenters are Vandana Shiva, a worldrenowned activist, physicist, feminist and the founder of Navdanya, Annie Leonard, the author and host of The Story of Stuff and director of The Story of Stuff Project, Richard Heinberg, the author of ten books, including The Party’s Over, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, Bill McKibben, the author of a dozen books about the environment and the economy including The End of Nature and Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Helena Norberg-Hodge, the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC) and its predecessor, the Ladakh Project. She is the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh and producer and co-director of the film, The Economics of Happiness, Judy Wicks, the founder of White Dog Café and an international leader and speaker in the local living economies movement. Judy is co-founder of the nationwide Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), Rebecca Tarbotton, Executive Director of Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and former Project Coordinator at ISEC. Under her direction, RAN challenges corporate power in order to protect endangered forests, transform dirty energy expansion into a clean energy future, and combat global warming.

There will also be performances by Jennifer Berezan (edgeofwonder.com), Nina Wise (ninawise.com) and Wes “Scoop” Nisker (http://woodzie.org/scoop/)

You can download the PDF Conference brochure by clicking here

The date to obtain discounted tickets is January 15, so if this is of interest to you, please check out the brochure and make your ticket purchase before then.

Please let me know if you decide to attend and perhaps a group of us can have a lunch or dinner together. I will be there to interview a few of the conference speakers in preparing my story.

In this fascinating interview, radio talk host James Martinez reveals the first hint of a people centered ethical transformative currency and banking system that just might be able to solve our economic crisis and is being put in place by a group of as yet un-named spiritual business and government visionaries in 130 countries. At a minimum, this is a piece of potential positive news to start the year. It will be very interesting to see how this story unfolds.

Derek Sivers is a highly successful entrepreneur, coach and music industry pro whose inspirational blog posts are excelent reminders about the art of humanistic business and actionable advice for musicians. I particularly like his most recent post.

I feel like I know almost nothing about business, because the only business I’ve ever done is the co-op / sharing model.

It goes like this:

1. You already have something that people want.

It might be something you own, something you’ve learned how to do, or access to valuable resources, space, or people.

2. Find a way to share it with everyone who needs it.

Share because it’s what you do for friends, because it’s the right thing to do, because it makes the world a better place, and because it’ll make you deeply happy.

Share as your contribution in return for all the things and ideas that people have shared with you.

(If you’re having a bad day, or someone has recently wronged you, you may not feel the world has shared much with you, but here’s a reminder.)

3. If it takes some effort for you to share it, you can charge a little something for your effort, to ensure that this giving can continue.

My examples:
In 1994, the U.S. Copyright office still didn’t have their copyright forms online. You still had to mail a letter to Washington DC to ask them to mail you some blank forms, if you wanted to copyright your songs. I scanned all the forms, and put them on my website for free as printable downloads, for any musician who needed them. For the next year or two, until the government started putting the forms online, my site was the only place to get them. This was my first effort to contribute back to this great invention of the internet.

In 1995, I learned how to trademark my band name. It took many hours of work to figure out the legalese, but I did it.
I wrote out the step-by-step instructions and put them on my band’s website for free. For years it was the go-to resource for musicians who wanted to trademark their name.

In 1996, I had a little record label, so I got a UPC barcode account, so I could put unique UPC barcodes on my CDs. I had to pay $750 to the Universal Code Council to get a company account, but that meant I was allowed to create 100,000 products under my account. Musician friends asked how, so I showed them how, but also said they could use one of my product IDs. At first, I did this for free, as a favor, until friends started sending strangers my way. Because it took a little work to generate the number, create their EPS/TIFF graphic barcode, and keep track of their unique IDs forever, I charged $20. Over the next 12 years, this made me almost $2 million.

In 1997, I got a credit card merchant account to sell my own CD at live shows. It cost $1000 in set-up fees and took three months of red-tape paperwork. Then I built a little online shopping cart, which also took months of work, just to sell my own CD. Musician friends asked if they could use mine instead of having to go through all of that work, so I said OK. At first, I did this for free, as a favor, until it was taking up all of my time. Because it took me 45 minutes of work to digitize, stock, set up a new album in my system, I charged $35 per new album. Because it took 10 minutes of work to pick, pack, and ship a purchased CD, I charged $4 per CD sold. Over the next 12 years, this made me about $20 million.

In 1999, I had learned a lot about hosting websites. Linux, Apache, PHP, SQL, FTP, DNS, Qmail, SpamAssassin, etc. I had done it for myself for my band’s website, then for CD Baby, and bought my own servers. So when friends would complain about their existing web-hosting company, I’d host them on my servers instead. At first, I did this for free, as a favor, until it was filling up my server. Because each server cost me $300/month, and I had to hire a full-time person to manage this, I charged $20 per month. (In 1999, this was way cheap.)
Over the next 9 years, this made me about $5 million.

Since 2000, I’ve been sharing everything I’ve learned for free. I’m not the smartest guy, probably below average, but it costs nothing to share, and it’s the right thing to do, so I do. Over the last 11 years, this made me incredibly happy and lucky, because of all the interesting people I’ve met by doing it.

Point being:

None of these things looked like a business venture.

All of them were just sharing something I already had.

People often ask me if I have any suggestions for what kind of business they should get into.

I tell them the only thing I know how to recommend: “Start by sharing whatever you’ve got.”

© 2011 Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers
Entrepreneur, programmer, avid student of life. I make useful things, and share what I learn.

Me in 10 seconds

I’m an entrepreneur. I treat work as play.
I live by “whatever scares you, go do it”.
I’m a minimalist. The less I own, the happier I am.
I’m a learning addict.
I’m very comfortable being the leader and being on stage.
This is my favorite fable.

Official Bragging Bio

 

Originally a professional musician and circus clown, Derek Sivers created CD Baby in 1998. It became the largest seller of independent music online, with $100M in sales for 150,000 musicians. In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby for $22M, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education.

He is a frequent speaker at the TED Conference, with over 5 million views of his talks.

In 2011, he published a book which shot to #1 on all of its Amazon categories.

Derek Sivers lives in Singapore, where he is creating his next company.