Act: Inspiration

The Great Simplification: Vicki Robin, Money and Life’s Energy

June 2, 2022

Conversation Recorded on February 21, 2022)

On this episode, we meet with social innovator, writer, and speaker, Vicki Robin.

Robin unpacks how the machine of community begins. How does being vulnerable, sharing, and being obligated to others create a system that allows everyone to contribute?  Why do we need to learn to begin asking for help?

Further, Robin shares how we can begin to take steps toward food resiliency. Robin shares the story of how she only ate food that was produced within a 10-mile radius of her home for 30 days, and how we should all begin to think and act locally.

About Vicki Robin

Vicki Robin is a prolific social innovator, writer and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008, 2018). It was an instant NY Times best seller in 1992 and steadily appeared on the Business Week Best Seller list from 1992-1997. It is available now in twelve languages.

Blessing the Hands that Feed Us; Lessons from a 10-mile diet (Viking/Penguin 2014) recounts her adventures in hyper-local eating and what she learned about food and farming as well as belonging and hope.

Show Notes

00:45: Vicki Robin Works + Info
https://vickirobin.com/
Your Money or Your Lifehttps://vickirobin.com/books/your-money-or-your-life/
Blessing the Hands that Feed Ushttps://vickirobin.com/books/blessing-the-hands-that-feed-us/

FIRE community
https://vickirobin.com/playing-with-fire/

06:58: The superorganism
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067

08:44: Money is a claim on energy
https://read.realityblind.world/view/975731937/212/

11:32: Food deserts
https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts

11:58: Wealth gap
ttps://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/

17:11: Post Carbon Institute
https://www.postcarbon.org/

18:11: 30% GDP drop during the Great Depression
https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression

21:57: Siddhartha
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Siddhartha

24:30: Thoreau 
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/

27:27: Stoicism
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/

29:44: Decrease of insect biomass
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/2/e2023989118

29:45: More plastic than fish in the ocean
https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/plastic-soup/more-plastic-than-fish/#:~:text=Plastic%20production%20will%20increase%20by,particularly%20vulnerable%20to%20plastic%20pollution.

29:55: Coral populations dying
https://theconversation.com/coral-reefs-are-dying-as-climate-change-decimates-ocean-ecosystems-vital-to-fish-and-humans-164743#:~:text=The%20world%20has%20already%20lost,primarily%20due%20to%20rising%20temperatures.

31:05: Once basic needs are met, the best things in life are free
https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q1/money-only-buys-happiness-for-a-certain-amount.html

35:06: The Ecological Footprint Mathis Wackernagel
https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/ecological-footprint/

37:04: Hyperlocal eating – 10 mile diet
https://10milediet.wordpress.com/

37:36: Transition time movement
https://transitionnetwork.org/about-the-movement/what-is-transition/#:~:text=Transition%20is%20a%20movement%20that,based%20in%20the%20Transition%20Principles.

42:55: The waning of reciprocity in modern culture
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0232704

48:17: Conversation Cafe
https://www.conversationcafe.org/

50:25: Hero’s journey
https://vickirobin.com/playing-with-fire/

53:52: How to be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpN-H68rmb4

55:03: Fridays for Future
https://fridaysforfuture.org/

Teaser photo credit: On the Bluff Trail in Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, Whidbey Island. By Seabix – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65600661

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens is the Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF) an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles.

Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.


Tags: building resilient economies, the great simplification