How *Not* to Destroy Our Planet: Kate Raworth on “Doughnut Economics”

Kate Raworth:

There’s a real possibility of shedding that hundred years of consumer marketing. And just going back to the fundamental values, what does it mean to belong and be loved and admired and to be creative and to feel we have agency in our lives?

Marie Forleo:

Hey, it’s Marie Forleo. And welcome to another episode of The Marie Forleo Podcast and MarieTV, which is the place to be to create a business and life that you love. So today I’m super excited because we are talking with a woman whose ideas have fascinated me for years. I’ve literally been dreaming of having this woman on the show and she is here today. Her ideas are fresh, they are provocative, they are compelling. And if you’re someone who cares about humanity’s ability to survive and really thrive in the coming years, this is a conversation you do not want to miss.

Kate Raworth is a renegade economist focused on making economics fit for 21st century realities. She’s written extensively for media, including The Guardian, the New Statesman, Newsweek.com, and Wired.com. She’s also contributed to programs for the BBC, CNN World News, the World Service, ABC, Al Jazeera, and ITV. Kate is the creator of the Doughnut of Social and Planetary Boundaries and co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Her internationally best-selling book, Doughnut Economics, has been translated into over 20 languages.

Kate, thank you so much for being here. I was saying just before we’re kind of doing the official thing, I’ve been obsessed with you for years. So I watched your TED Talk and immediately I was blown away. I’d never heard, seen, understood anything like what you were describing, even though there were these kinds of inklings in me like, “God, there’s stuff that’s off about this drive for constant growth and climbing, climbing…” You know, it just feels unsustainable.

So I wanted to say that. And then when I got your book and read your book, I was like, “My goodness.” So this has been something that I’ve wanted to, I’ve wanted to have you on the show literally for years. And now that we’re kind of in the midst still of a pandemic, and there has been, so much has happened, it feels even more appropriate to have this conversation. So take us back to the early days of your career. What actually inspired you to become an economist in the first place?

Kate Raworth:

Oh my goodness. Well, I’m a 50 year old woman in the UK, and so I was a teenager of the 1980s. I remember while I was dancing to Duran Duran in the early days of Madonna, I remember a famine in Ethiopia. I remember a hole opening up in the ozone lab. I remember the Exxon Valdez ship spilling oil into Alaska’s waters. And so as a teenager, I had that open sense of, “I want to help tackle these issues.” And I thought that learning economics would give me this mother tongue of public policy. I thought it would equip me with the tools I needed to help do something about this. So off I went to university and I studied economics and I was just so frustrated by what I learned because it just didn’t touch on so many of these issues, they were peripheral to what we were studying.

You couldn’t even study environmental economics in those days, even though it’s become such a crucial crisis in the world. So then I walked away from economics. I was actually embarrassed by the idea of saying, “Hello, I’m an economist.” I don’t want to be that label. So walked away from it. I worked for the UN for some years, I worked for Oxfam for many years. And then actually during the global financial crisis, I had tiny babies in arms. I had twin babies right around then. And I remember hearing economists saying, “Oh, it’s time to rewrite the economics to reflect the financial crisis and financial realities.” And I just thought, “You know, if we’re going to rewrite economics, can’t we rewrite it to reflect all of the crises and all of the realities?” The social crises that go on internationally and within countries, people living in really tough circumstances of deprivation and the ecological crisis of climate breakdown, of our footprint on the planet.

So that brought me back towards economics, but I wanted to come back and flip it on its head. And what if we start economics, not with supply and demand and the equations that they teach that scare a lot of people and make a lot of people think, “This isn’t for me.” What if we start with something that everybody understands, human needs, our essential needs, and protecting the life support systems of our planetary home. And if you put them at the center of our vision, what kind of economics would we create then? And that became a really exciting question that turned into the book, Doughnut Economics, and I’ve just been riding with that journey ever since.

Marie Forleo:

So I’m curious, did you have other folks in your cohort, other folks that you knew, whether it was from the UN or Oxfam or even from your university days that were equally as dismayed and confused and disillusioned by what was being taught classically and what the reality was in the world? Were there other people who were as dissatisfied as you, or did you kind of feel like a lone wolf for a bit?

Kate Raworth:

I think there’s a lot of people in the world who are dissatisfied, but they leave economics alone. It’s quite abstract.

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Kate Raworth:

It’s quite intimidating. When I was writing the book and I was a mom at the school gates picking up my kids and people would say, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well, I’m writing a book on rethinking economics.” And the first thing people do is they draw back. They say, “I was never very good at maths at school.” And I would say, “Look, the only numbers in this book are the page numbers, we can all do this.”

Marie Forleo:

Yes.

Kate Raworth:

And by sticking the word “Doughnut” in front of economics, no one’s frightened of doughnuts.

You might love them or hate them, but you’re not scared of them. So it’s made it much more accessible to people. But yes, I feel like I’ve spent my career actually at the UN, at Oxfam, surrounded by people who were working in community development, in local agriculture, in health and education, and actually deeply frustrated by the very narrow set of ideas that gets called economics. And I think all of that work and experience and people’s experience in their communities, this is all what we should put at the heart of re-imagining our economies in a much more bigger, open, embracing way of the unpaid work that many of us do as mums, the unpaid work of caring, and the paid work, and the community work. These all contribute to a thriving economy and let’s make economics recognize all of that.

Marie Forleo:

So I’m curious, when did you become clear that there was a problem with growth, putting little bunny ears around it, and how we think about it? I mean, I think most of us, including myself, we’re all taught to believe that when it comes to our economies and money and GDP, that growth is always a good thing and growth is supposed to mean progress, but you have a very different point of view.

Kate Raworth:

Yeah. The moment I came clear on that was when the moment I tried to question it and I was in my thirties, I tried to ask, “Must an economy grow indefinitely? Could it? What if it can’t?” And I realized that I was suddenly almost standing at a cliff edge. This was a very tight, terrifying place to stand. It was very lonely place to stand. Very few economists were there with you. Many of them thought you were really way too radical and you’d gone over the edge, and I found that fascinating in itself. But also I realized I had never, in all my education, been invited to ask this question. It had just never come up. And that was a real curiosity to me. And then I started to think about the power of the appeal of growth. Growth, growth’s a wonderful, healthy phase of life.

My kids are now 12 years old, they’re growing very fast. We love to see our plants grow, our gardens grow. So no wonder it appeals to us. And as you got a lovely piece of hose pipe here, I never travel without a hose pipe. This is the shape of growth that we’re told should be the shape of our economies. Growing endlessly, national income rising year on year on year on year, no matter how rich a country already is, its national income should rise indefinitely. That I found bizarre as well. So no matter how rich we become, we always need more growth to solve our problems. And just to bring it close to our own lives, even though growth seems like a wonderful phase of life, I can take us to a very different perspective on it. So if I said to you, my friend went to the doctor and the doctor told her she had a growth, that suddenly feels very, very different.

And we go quiet because we know that within our own bodies, which are complex living systems, something that tries to grow endlessly within our bodies, we call that a cancer and we move in and do everything we can to stop it and to restore health. So growth is a wonderful, healthy phase of life, but nothing in nature that thrives does it by growing forever. It needs to grow up and mature. Now that makes sense in our bodies. It makes sense in our families. If my kids grew two inches every year, they would literally no longer belong in my household. Think of anything you love and imagine what would happen if it grew indefinitely, I’m going to guess it would almost be necessarily be destroyed. So things need to belong within other parts of our lives. Now, when we take that very life-based earth-based perspective on growth, if we then bring that into economics, it’s a completely alien way of thinking about it because economists have just become used to only looking at that first half of the idea. Growth is good. Growth is good.

And so it initially seemed like a very, very radical and dangerous place to start. “You’re really going to say you’re not for endless growth?” What I’ve really seen over the last 10, even just five years, is more and more people within economics and definitely outside of economics, questioning that and saying, “Well, that doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, of course things need to grow and grow up. How could you have endless growth on a delicately balanced living planet?” So the question is almost being reversed and the expectation now goes to economists, “Explain to us how you think our economy could grow endlessly if this planet is going to thrive.” So it’s turning into a much more interesting debate.

Marie Forleo:

This is where I got so excited too, because when I first saw the imagery of basically the hockey puck, which we’ve all seen a million times and it’s like, where does that end? And through your TED Talk and through the book, you introduced us to this idea of a circle and a doughnut. I mean, I was like, “Gosh, there’s so many symbols in our world…

Kate Raworth:

Yes.

Marie Forleo:

…where we think about something as being whole and interconnected, and we think about circles as organic and life-giving.”

Kate Raworth:

Yes.

Marie Forleo:

For me, there was a lot of other symbolism in there too that may or may not be intended but I’m like, I don’t want to take this to this place. But I had the momentary thought, I’m like, “Wow. One is somewhat of a masculine thing.”

Kate Raworth:

That one?

Marie Forleo:

Yep! And there was also this kind of feminine expression, and there’s everything in between. But I was like, “There are so many layers to this that are fascinating to me.” I think one of the things that I also loved that I grew to understand from your work was unpacking the very nature of the word “economics”. You had shared that when we go back to its ancient Greek roots, economics means the art of household management. Can you speak a little bit into how that understanding can help us begin to rethink what economic success even means?

Kate Raworth:

Yeah. So I love that you bring this up. So normally if you say to somebody, “What does economics mean?” They’ll say growth, interest rates, jobs. But actually, when we go back to that ancient Greek root, it comes from two words, Oikos and Nomos. It means the art of household management. How should we best manage our households? Now it began actually at the level of an individual household, the first text called The Economist was written literally… Back 2000 years ago in ancient Greece, “How should a man manage his estate? Should he trust his wife to manage the accounts? How should he manage his oil, his wine, his cloth?” And then the next level took it to the city state. “How should the city state manage its affairs?” And then the economist, Adam Smith, in 1776, he founded sort of Western economics, talking about the nation state.

“Why are some nation states thriving, like the UK at the time, while others seem to be stagnating?” Now that’s a natural progression going on here from the household to the city, to the nation. 200 years after Adam Smith, it’s time for us to look up to the next level. It’s the planetary household, it makes sense. We now have the science to understand it, we have the global connections to speak across planetary devices as we’re doing right now in a moment. We need to think about our planetary home on which we now realize we depend upon her life-supporting systems of a stable climate and fertile soils, a protective ozone layer and healthy oceans, and ample biodiversity. And then when we reclaim the name of economics, the management of the household and the interest of all of her inhabitants, all human beings and the rest of the living world, now if that’s economics, that’s a really exciting 21st-century reinvention of the possibilities.

Marie Forleo:

I love when you share this too, you have it in your TED Talk and in the book as well, you say, “Today, we have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive. And what we need, especially in the richest countries are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow.” And I’m just like, boom, because I feel like I want to talk about that and unpack that a little bit more. And I do want to get into the doughnut and the actual structure of it and what it means. But I think about a lot of the folks in our audience and folks that come and write into our show, write in to me and there’s even this existential pressure, I think, in society about what success means on a personal level, what growth means.

And if you’re not dominating and you’re not crushing, and this thing, and we have so much burnout and we have so many people pushing themselves beyond their own human limits and boundaries and going like, “What the heck is all of this even for?” So this notion of building lives that are centered around thriving rather than growth, I find so many implications for your idea. So I’m going to be quiet for a minute if there’s anything that you want to say about this idea of economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow. And then of course I’ve got a million more questions.

Kate Raworth:

So in the book… And I really had to dive deep and discuss these ideas with myself, and I find it very challenging because as I said, it took me to this precipice of my education as an economist, there was no path forward. And I really thought about the ways in which our societies and economies are locked into endless growth. There are some ways we’re locked in economically, the need for market returns in financial markets. We’re locked in politically, governments want to be able to say the economy has grown. They want to be members of the G20, the club of the biggest, most powerful nations, but we’re locked in socially too. And I’m just going to focus there because of the examples you just brought.

We’ve had a hundred years of consumer propaganda led by a man called Edward Bernays. Fascinatingly, he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. And he realized that if he took his uncle’s psychotherapy and connected it to advertising, he could create retail therapy. So Bernays realized that if he convinced us that our most basic desires like to be admired, to be included, to be loved, if he could connect those to that phone and that car, “Buy that bag, and you’ll be admired.” “Have that phone and you’ll be included.” He invented consumer propaganda and advertising and marketing. And I want to say, Edward, well done because it worked, but please can you now join the other team and help us unravel that because these objects do not bring us belonging and connection and meaning. It is of course, through other people, through community and more and more people I think are aiming to discover that.

But we’ve also, on this subject of growth, from that mentality, and particularly, I think marketed by what’s typically known as the American Dream, the idea that a person in their own life is successful if they’re getting promoted and they’re getting high salary year on year or decade on decade, they’re getting a bigger house, a second car, but also that their kids should have more than they had, that this was progression. And ever since, say, the Second World War, that was a very strong symbol of, “I’ve done well and I’ve done well by my kids and they’re doing well.” But now I look at many young people, they’re not demanding or expecting to earn more than their parents.

I see so many young people marching saying, “We want a stable climate.” So actually what they aspire to is much more existential in terms of the stability of our planetary home, and of course, some young people say, “I never want to own a car. Why would I want to own a car? I just want to rent one at the moment with this app, and when I need it, I’m going to travel on public transport.” And they want to live much lighter. So there’s a real possibility of shedding that hundred years of consumer marketing. And just going back to the fundamental values, what does it mean to belong and be loved and admired and to be creative and to feel we have agency in our lives? And it rarely comes from shopping.

Marie Forleo:

Yes. So I want to talk about the doughnut. It is this amazing image. It’s an amazing metaphor and an idea. So for those who haven’t seen the TED Talk and they haven’t really fully understood where we’re going yet, can you walk us through the doughnut?

Kate Raworth:

I certainly can. So I sat down in 2012 and I tried to draw a new diagram for the economy because I think we need to replace old ideas with new ones. So if we want to dislodge this image of endless growth as the shape of progress, then what do we put there instead? And I know a doughnut is not the most intuitive maybe idea of what this would be, but the good news is you don’t have to eat this one. It’s the only one that actually does turn out to be any good for us. And of course I have it here, here it is, here’s the doughnut. So think of humanity’s use of Earth’s resources, radiating out from the middle of the circle and think of it as a compass for human prosperity this century. So the goal is to leave no one in the hole in the middle of the doughnut, because that is where people are left falling short on the essentials of life.

That’s where people do not have the resources they need for good food and housing, healthcare, education, income, connection, community, social equity, leave no one in the hole. The world’s governments have already agreed to this, by the way, these a crowdsourced from the sustainable development goals that they all signed up to. So it’s agreed internationally, leave no one below this social foundation. That’s a good start. But as we use earth’s resources, we know that we, humans, start to use them and they can put pressure on earth’s life support system. So just as there’s an inner limit that no one should fall below, there’s also an outer limit here called the ecological ceiling, where if we go too far in using earth’s resources, we will induce climate breakdown. We will acidify the oceans and create a hole in the ozone layer. We will destroy the biodiversity of earth’s forests.

We use up the water from the lakes and rivers. We break down the fabric of life and these around the outside, they’re known as the nine planetary boundaries, you can think of them as the life support systems that make life work on planet earth. The only known living planet in the universe, so it’s pretty worth looking after this one. So in the very simplest of terms, the goal of the doughnut is to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. And suddenly, as you can see, the shape of progress has completely changed. It’s not this ever-rising line of growth, it’s this… When I do with my hands, I think, “Of course, it’s a heartbeat.” And I love what you said about the symbols of those images. I was so struck when I started looking at the images used by many ancient and indigenous cultures, the yin yang, the Dawa’s endless knot, the Buddhist’s knot, the Celtic double spiral.

They all have this dynamic balance and it’s a much more feminine shape and it’s holistic and it’s not aiming endlessly to grow, and I suddenly realized that that Western concept of growth, that’s the outlier. That’s the odd one out. And can we, as Western societies, learn from the deep wisdom embedded in these symbols of ancient cultures and indigenous cultures, can we create our own wisdom that brings us back into balance? So it was a really profound realization for me, the importance of visual imagery in helping us shape what we think progress looks like.

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. And I love that too, because I wanted to also highlight this, I read doing my research, that when you originally kind of started putting this image together, do I have it right that you actually had it and you stuck it in a drawer for six months? Can you tell us about that?

Kate Raworth:

Yeah. And I like that you pull that out and I know from your show, why you pulled that out because when the first time I drew it, so I’d seen this diagram of these nine planetary boundaries at this outer limit of pressure on the planet. And I was working at Oxfam, I’m sitting in this big open plan office. Now people over there campaigning to raise funds for an imminence famine in the Sahel. There were people here campaigning for health for all in South Asia. I thought, “Hang on, if there’s an outer limit of humanity’s use of earth resources, there’s an inner limit too, we call them human rights. So let’s draw that in.” So I drew a circle within a circle and it looked like a doughnut. Now I was sitting at my desk and I was drawing this, literally sketching it on the back of an envelope.

And I thought, “Hmm, I like that. I find that satisfying. I like pictures, but I’m not sure anybody else is going to think much of it.” So I did literally shove it in the bottom drawer of my desk. I had this real feeling as a social scientist and an errant economist too, natural scientists would say, “Well, yes dear, go back to your table, that’s a bit fluffy and fuzzy.” So I literally just put it away. And then I kept finding myself in conversations with people saying, “We really need to bring together the world of social justice with environmental campaigns.” And I said, “Oh, I’ve got this… Shall I show you?” And they said, “That’s good. That’s good.” And then I was at a meeting October the 18th, 2011, I can tell you almost to the day of this call.

I was at a meeting with Earth systems scientists who did these planetary boundaries. And I was really intimidated. I was thinking, “I’m a question of why I’m here. I’m not a statistician. What am I going to say?” And someone right at the beginning of the meeting, leaned across the table and said, “But I’m looking to our colleague from Oxfam…” Me, “Because my problem with these planetary boundaries… My problem with this is there are no people in it.” And I had one of those moments, you think, “Am I going to do that? Am I going to stand up?” I hadn’t brought the diagram with me. It was a sketch in my bottom drawer. And it’s one of those moments in life, you think, “Am I going to do this? I’m going to do this.” And there was a big white board wall and there were some pens.

And it was that before you know it, you’re standing up and said, “Can I draw something on the wall?” And I drew it on the wall. I drew the planetary boundaries. And I said, “Just as there is an outer limit, there’s an inner limit.” I remember I drew it really, really quickly because I was very nervous. And I thought they’d say, “Yes, dear, go back to your chair.” And one of these scientists, he looked at it and he said, “That’s the diagram we’ve been missing all along. It’s not a circle, it’s a doughnut.” And that gave me this real clarity of conviction. “Okay. If a scientist is saying that’s been missing all along, there’s something here.” And I noticed that for the rest of the day of that meeting, people kept pointing to it and talking to it, it was immediately useful. So I’ve really learned a lot from that.

And I share that with people because I think a lot of people have an idea in their bottom drawer, that they think, “Well, I think that’s interesting, but maybe nobody else will.” And what happens when you bring it out and you actually have the courage of your ideas? I invite my students to mash up ideas they have. What happens when you try and put them together? Because this is where new ideas come from and when we see them, they’re published, then they’re in color and they’re beautifully designed and it just looks like they’ve always been there, but it wasn’t, it was a scrap of paper.

Marie Forleo:

Thank you so much for sharing that. And you were spot on because you know intuitively, we have so many brilliant souls. One of my beliefs is that every single one of us is on this planet for many reasons, we have many gifts and perspectives that only we’re here to share. And I love you revealing that story because it shows… Anyone who’s listening right now, they’re like, “Kate is brilliant.” And they’re just going like, “My goodness, how did she put…” And then there’s like, “Oh, it started on the back of an envelope. And she even thought that, ‘I just don’t know, let me put it in my drawer for a little bit.'” So once people started reading your work, embracing your work, getting so excited about this concept, they wanted to activate it in their cities and communities. So here comes the Doughnut Economics Action Lab. So I believe you said you’d never wanted to manage people or money or set up an organization. So I’m wondering if you can tell us how this came about.

Kate Raworth:

You’re absolutely right. So there was me, first of all, I worked at Oxfam, I was in research team. I was happily beavering away doing my research in the back room, loved that role. And then I left to write the book, Doughnut Economics, because it was really clear to me that this idea wanted to be expanded. And I wanted to re-approach economics, putting the doughnut at its center. And then when I was giving presentations of the book, after talk, people come up to me and they might say, “Yeah, could you sign the book?” But then they say, “Oh, by the way, I’m doing this. I’m a teacher. I’m teaching this in my classroom because the students deserve these new ideas.”

“I’m a town planner and I’m taking this into our next meeting.” “I’m a CEO,” or, “I’m a new employee,” or, “I’m a startup and I’m going to put this on our boardroom table because actually this could really help us ensure that we’re creating an enterprise that has purpose in the 21st century.” “I’m a community member and I’m going to take this to my low-carbon community meeting.” So all these people were doing it. And yes, it absolutely called me out of my comfort zone of being in a big organization and I’ll just do my research. I had that moment of, “Oh my goodness, I have to take responsibility for this idea and creating a space where people can come together and connect and inspire each other.” Because I also realized that the most inspiring person is not someone standing on a stage saying, “Here’s a theory and you could do this and you could do that.” The most inspiring person is the teacher who says, “And this is how I’m teaching it in my classroom.” To other teachers, that’s gold dust.

To mayors, hearing a mayor saying, “Yeah, I’m putting the heart of my city strategy.” To students saying, “I’m going to demand that we’re taught this in our classroom.” To business people, entrepreneurs, “I’m designing my business around this.” So if we can unleash peer-to-peer inspiration, that is what makes ideas fly. So yes, I found a co-founder, I needed a co-pilot, a wonderful Spanish woman called Carlota Sanz, I said, “Let’s co-found this together.” We set up Doughnut Economics Action Lab, it’s on the internet, that’s where it exists. So anyone can join us, come in through our door, on our website, become a member. We put all of our ideas in the comments. So we’ve turned the tools of Doughnut Economics into ideas in the comments. We invite people to take them, adapt them, create them. We just ask for reciprocity.

If you’re using these ideas, please share back how you’ve used them because we will learn so much from what you’ve done, how you’ve adapted it and other people will be so inspired by your practice. So that’s what my work is. And I tell you, it gets me into energy every single day, connecting with people all around the world, turning new ideas into practice, brilliantly in their own cultural context and renaming the doughnut, in Turkey, it’s called a Simit. In Spain, it’s Rosquillas. In Italy, it’s ciambella. Let’s make it our own cultural foods and really adapt it to every context.

Marie Forleo:

Yes. So I got so excited too, because again, as I’ve said, obsessed with you for years. And then I was laying in bed one Sunday morning. I don’t know if it was an article in The Times, or it was just something on my Apple News Feed, but I said, “Oh my goodness.” I was here thinking, “I need more of the world to know about Kate.” Again, trying to get my team to get in touch with your team so we could talk about this. And then I’m like, “Amsterdam has adopted this. And I think Portland and Philadelphia.” Anything that you can reveal about cities like that, that are moving forward with this? And we know it’s not going to be easy. We know it’s going to be messy, but it is so worth it. So anything that you want to share about the cities that are working to move the doughnut to the center of their city’s thriving policy.

Kate Raworth:

Brilliant. So, yes, and this is the work that’s been really occupying and exciting me for the last couple of years. Cities like Amsterdam came to us and said, “We like this idea.” Many progressive policymakers, the deputy mayor, “I like this idea. I want to put this at the center of our policy to become a circular economy. So we need to use resources again and again, far more carefully, collectively, creatively, and slowly. And the doughnut is a really great symbol of wanting to become a thriving city, not a growth city. We want to thrive, we want everybody here to live well, and we know we need to come back within planetary boundaries.” So we began running workshops with Amsterdam and Portland and Philadelphia, and then of course, the COVID crisis hit and many cities were stopped for really taking this work forward at speed.

Amsterdam, with that Dutch determination, decided to forge ahead and actually in April, 2020, in the height of their COVID crisis, they released… I have it right here, their Amsterdam City Portrait. We co-created it with them, a portrait of their city through the lens of the doughnut. And they put it at the heart of their strategy. I’m going to Amsterdam because they are then saying 18 months on, they’re saying, “Right, we’re going to hold ourselves to account. What have we done? Are we moving into the doughnut or not? How are we mobilizing our city change-makers?” The government, but also the universities, the civic networks, the entrepreneurs, the neighborhoods, there’s an amazing energy kicking off there. And of course, they inspire others elsewhere. So cities from Glasgow to Oslo to even nations, Barbados, Curacao, in the Caribbean, in Bangladesh and India, in Africa.

We’re in touch with colleagues that are saying, “We want to try putting these ideas into practice in our city.” And I love what you said, Marie. And of course it’s not easy. And of course it’s going to be messy because they’ve got to introduce these ideas to become regenerative, become distributive, to pursue the doughnut rather than growth, in the midst of a very complex economic situation that’s embedded in the country, embedded in the region, embedded in the world. So it’s tough at every corner. And yet it’s exhilarating at every corner. The one thing I’ve learned is there are amazing change-makers everywhere. Some of them work for government, some of them protest in the streets. Some of them are teachers in the classroom. Some of them are students. Some of them are CEOs and some of them are founding of social enterprise. Folks are everywhere and when they pop up and they connect and they start to put that energy together, it’s phenomenal. And that’s what keeps me going every day.

Marie Forleo:

Thank you so much for sharing that. As I was coming down, getting ready for this interview, I’m like, “How do I get in touch with the presumed next mayor of New York?” Which is New York City, where I am. And I’m like, “We need him, I need to get the doughnut.” It’s so exciting. And I feel like even on an intuitive level to say, “Okay, we’re changing the goal,” which is one of the things you talk about in the book, right? It’s like not growth per se, as an old solid idea, there are certain times when growth is necessary, but then thriving as the main concept, that is just so much more invigorating, so much more exciting. Unleashes a level of creativity that for me, is free from this unrealistic weight and pressure that I feel like many of us have been living under not realizing there was another alternative and it comes to, wow, the whole world is now open to us.

And many of the ways that all of us are moving towards living. Using less, having a smaller footprint, not striving to be something that just feels grotesque. It’s just extremely exciting. So I am excited to watch how it continues to unfold and it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to happen overnight. But here where I am in the Northeast, we had two back-to-back storms and I know every single community around the world.

Kate Raworth:

Yeah.

Marie Forleo:

It’s not, “Climate change is coming,” it’s, “Climate change is here.” And so this is the time that we need to embrace these ideas. And however hard it is, however messy it is, however long it is, this is our path towards the future. So…

Kate Raworth:

Yeah. Can I jump in there with a little personal story?

Marie Forleo:

Yeah. Please.

Kate Raworth:

Because you were talking about… So I used to live in New York when I worked at the UN, I loved that, I loved it. I lived there for four years. Now in New York, it would seem crazy to me to own a car. I traveled everywhere on public transport. And then I moved to the UK, I had twins, we got a car to move around. And so I live in the city of Oxford. And so until January, this year, there was a car sitting outside my house and then around Christmas, my partner and I just looked at each other and we said, “We know enough about climate breakdown and the causes of it. And we live in a city where there are other options and we need to have the courage to take that step, to do what we know we should do. Let’s give up the car.”

We’d got a car because we had tiny babies and now they’re 12 years old and they can bike everywhere, so we thought, “There’s no longer that reason.” And it was really fascinating. I made the call to a company to say, “Please can you come and take away the car and dismantle it.” And they recycled 95% of the pieces. It was a diesel car. So we thought it just shouldn’t be on the streets. It doesn’t belong on planet Earth anymore. Let’s just let it go and leave and thank it and let it go. And the car company said, “Okay, does the car have wheels?” “Yes, it has.” “Does it move?” And they were really surprised, I could tell, that we were getting rid of a car, it works perfectly. You can just turn the key, it drives. And that was a weird feeling of, “Is this a weird thing to do?”

Marie Forleo:

Yeah.

Kate Raworth:

And then, the lady said… It was a fantastic female truck driver. This massive car machine carrying about 10 cars, but she said, “Okay, I can come next Tuesday, five days away.” And it was that waiting for her to come and take the car away. And then she finally said, “No, no, sorry. I can only come next Wednesday.” Oh, another day. I just thought, “Please just come take it away,” because it’s so hard, you question it, “Should we be giving it away? It’s really convenient, actually. Should we be giving it away?” And it was only when she’d actually loaded it onto this big flatbed truck and driven it down the end of the street and it had turned the corner and it had gone.

It was literally, I felt psychologically this lightness, there’s now an empty space in front of my house and we chalk it and we build snowman in it in winter and we celebrate its emptiness and it really made me feel that transformation at a personal level and remember that change is hardest just before we make it. And we’re so aware of everything we’re about to lose. And it’s so hard to imagine the lightness of the transformation. And when you get to the other side, you quickly look back and think, “Why did that seem so hard? Why did we take so long to do that? Because it feels great to be on the other side of this.” And I think that’s what we’re all going through as whole societies too.

Marie Forleo:

Yes, 100%. And on that thought, one of the things that is very true about our community, I always like to help them turn insight into action. So I’ve heard you say, “Don’t be an optimist if it makes you relax, don’t be a pessimist if it makes you give up.” So what can we do? And I loved your story. What are some other things that we can do, especially as individuals, if we’re not, let’s say in public office or for anyone feeling like, “Well, I don’t have much influence, I don’t have a big audience. I’m not a teacher.” Any ideas that you’d like to share?

Kate Raworth:

Yeah. So don’t be an optimist. Don’t be a pessimist, but be in action. Some people say, “I want to be an activist.” And other people find that word a little too confronting. So I’d say be in action. Be in action in all the networks of influence you have and we all do have many. We live in homes, so we can say, “Right, I’m going to start with my home. What am I bringing into my home? And what is the stream of waste going out? And how can I reduce what comes in and how can I separate what’s going out? How am I powering my home? What’s my energy supply? How am I saving my money? And can I move it to a bank that actually invests in the future?” So we can take our own homes. We can redistribute unpaid caring work in the household.

In fact, we’ve just drawn up a little timetable for washing up in our household, the 12 year olds, they’re now part of the unpaid caring work. And it’s about teaching my son, as much as my daughter, “This is everybody’s work.” And that’s really important redistribution of work. So we can start within our homes, but we all have influence. Once I was giving a talk and afterwards, a 17-year-old girl came up to me, she said, “Well, I wanted to ask a question, but I’m only 17.” And I said, “Hang on. Next time, raise your hand and say, ‘I’m 17 years old and here’s my question,’ because actually that is your power. And you can influence and reach 17-year-old girls in a way that no adult can get close to.” And by the way, a 70-year-old man in the pub, in the bar, can talk to his peers in a way that no teenager can reach.

So each one of us has huge influence, really interesting research shows that people are most influenced, not by the statistics and the facts and what they see on TV, but what their peers are doing. So if they hear that their peers are going vegetarian or going vegan or giving up their car or joining a car-sharing club or switching their electricity account, that’s what makes people think, “Oh, you did it and they did it too.” And we start to move. So we must all remember that when we make these changes and talk with joy about what we’ve done, it really starts to influence other people. So we can all transform our homes and think about the way we invest and divest and protest and volunteer and support each other. I think there’s a power at the school gate amongst parents who are thinking about how we raise our children. So even if you’re not in a formal position of influence in the workplace, you can be in an amazing position of influence in the community. And I really do think change happens gradually, the influence of our peers, so we all inspire each other.

Marie Forleo:

Brilliant. Kate, you are so brilliant. Thank you so much for taking the time today. If people want to learn more about the Action Lab, where do they go, exactly?

Kate Raworth:

They go exactly to doughnuteconomics.org. And you’ve got to spell that with an English spelling of doughnut, D-O-U-G-H, doughnuteconomics.org. On Twitter, we’re @DoughnutEcon. We love people to come and just have a look at the website, have a look at the platform and you’re welcome to join, or you’re welcome to browse. And if you want to join and browse, any other members anywhere near me, you can see there’s a map of where people are. Oh, look, there’s more and more people popping up in New York City, for instance, what if we were to start a Doughnut Group, New York City, what would that look like? What would we do? What would we talk about? Maybe have a book club together. These Doughnut groups are popping up all over the world. So join the platform, browse the platform, take the ideas if they inspire you into your work, because this is how change happens.

Marie Forleo:

Beautiful, well, I can’t wait to hear updates and consider me in the doughnut, I’m on team doughnut, definitely. I’m on team doughnut…

Kate Raworth:

Excellent.

Marie Forleo:

…all the way around. Kate, you are brilliant. We wish you so much luck in all the future endeavors, keep us posted and we will keep sharing. Thank you so much.

Kate Raworth:

Thank you. I’m just delighted to be here with you today. Brilliant conversation.

Marie Forleo:

And thank you so much for tuning in today. I mean, I love that conversation. I’m really curious to hear what you think. So what was the biggest insight that you’re taking away, and most importantly, how do you see yourself putting that insight into action starting right now? I want you to leave a comment below and let us know. Now as always, the best conversations happen over at the magical land of marieforleo.com. So head on over there and leave a comment now, and if you’re not yet subscribed to our email list, whatcha thinking? We send the most amazing emails every single Tuesday that will keep you inspired and motivated to do the work that you were born to do. Until next time, stay on your game and keep going for your big dreams because the world really does need that very special gift that only you have. Thank you so much for watching and tuning in and I’ll catch you next time.

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