Host

The Garrison Institute co-founder, urban visionary and award-winning author Jonathan F.P. Rose.

Guest

John Fullerton is the founder and president of Capital Institute and a leading voice in the global movement for regenerative economics. A former Managing Director at JPMorgan, he left Wall Street in the early 2000s to explore how finance and economics could better serve life. Drawing on systems science, ecology, and long-term capital stewardship, Fullerton developed the Eight Principles of Regenerative Economics, a framework for redesigning capitalism to align with living systems. He is the author of Regenerative Capitalism.

Read and download the full transcript.

Show Notes

[00:00]
Host Jonathan FP Rose opens the episode with guest John Fullerton, outlining the conversation’s focus on designing an economy that behaves like a living system, regenerating conditions for life rather than depleting them. Fullerton’s background as a former Wall Street managing director and founder of the Capital Institute frames the episode’s journey from finance to systemic change.

[02:16]
Rose invites Fullerton to share his personal history: growing up in a comfortable suburb of Long Island, transitioning from international relations to economics in college, and rising through capital markets on Wall Street. Fullerton reflects on his evolution from financial success to seeking meaningful alignment between capital and social purpose.

[05:05]
Key turning points emerge, from considering investments in charter schools to a pivotal moment reading about Walter Annenberg’s philanthropy and realizing he wanted a different kind of life and contribution. Fullerton recounts a sailing trip across the Atlantic while reading Moby-Dick, during which their ship was almost destroyed by a whale. 

[12:21]
Fullerton recounts returning to New York on September 11, 2001, witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center, and recognizing it as a metaphor for the global economic system he had left behind. This moment triggered deep study and a search for meaning beyond Wall Street.

[14:55]
Reading the landmark Limits to Growth report confronted Fullerton with the Earth’s finite boundaries, pointing to what we now call the Polycrisis — an intersection of ecological limits, economic assumptions, and human wellbeing.

[20:29]
Fullerton discusses ecological economics, Aristotle’s distinction between the use of money to make money vs money having a real use value, and holism versus reductionism. He shares how thinkers like Herman Daly and Allan Savory influenced his understanding of living systems. He asserts we’ve built the economic system on the false principle of separation. 

[26:00]
Rose and Fullerton discuss how conventional economics ignores externalities and relationships, limiting wellbeing and resilience. Fullerton considers one of his major principles for his holistic understanding of how life works: In Right Relationship — systems grounded in symbiotic connections. 

[36:31]
Wealth is reframed beyond money — including natural, social, relational, spiritual, and temporal capitals. Discussion about how systems optimized purely for efficiency become fragile — resulting in events like the 2008 financial crash — while regenerative design balances efficiency and resilience. 

[42:06]
Discussion turns to the principle of innovation, qua natural phenomenon that complexifies life and adapts to the needs of the system (as opposed to extracting value from it, as is often the case in human innovation). Discussion of the principle of empowerment: just as oxygen must circulate freely for health, economic participation must be empowered across all communities for system-wide wellbeing. Further principles such as honoring community and place, the edge effect of abundance, robust circulatory flow, and dynamic balance are introduced as foundational to living systems and regenerative economics.

[50:33]
John explains his definition of “regeneration” as a scientific process, not just a rebranding of sustainability, that describes how life works — dynamic, self-organizing, and evolving. He distinguishes it from reductionist, mechanistic thinking and argues for a shift toward a living-systems worldview that integrates material, ecological, and even consciousness-based dimensions of reality. This reframing extends beyond ecological economics and challenges the Western habit of separating the mechanical from the “spiritual.”

[53:13]
Fullerton introduces a major evolution in his thinking: establishing the commons as a formal economic sector alongside the private and public sectors. Without a commons architecture, wealth derived from shared inheritance is privatized and extracted rather than stewarded for collective wellbeing.

[57:45]
Turning to finance, Fullerton proposes the need for a “capital cycle,” analogous to natural cycles like carbon or water. Today’s system circulates money without a built-in mechanism to restore balance to the whole. Shifting toward a regenerative economy begins with changing the underlying worldview — from Newtonian reductionism to a holistic living systems paradigm — creating the conditions for systemic redesign.