Reinvent Podcast

Douglas Rushkoff, author most recently of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, doesn’t blame the billionaires for income inequality—he blames the operating system. “It’s not about redistributing the spoils of capitalism after the fact,” said Rushkoff, “It’s about pre-distributing the means of production before the fact.” Our market, Rushkoff says, prioritizes stockholder profit over corporate sustainability. “The object of the VC is not to build a company. The object of the VC is to flip the company for 100x or 1000x of their original investment,” said Rushkoff. He gave examples of companies that he thinks are getting certain things right, like Kickstarter, a revenue-based business that chose an alternative way to structure its stock options; Meetup, which still profits a few million dollars annually and brings people together face to face; and Chobani, which gave ten percent of their shares to their employees pre-IPO.

Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), the leading voice for the millions of women who work as domestic workers, women who have been excluded from U.S. labor laws for decades. The NDWA, founded in 2007 and consisting of 55 organizations around the country, champions an eight-value framework called the Good Work Code, which includes principles like safety, transparency, stability, flexibility, and inclusion. Shah helps domestic workers navigate challenges that derive from their jobs moving online—how to leave a job that feels unsafe, for instance, without fearing the repercussions of a negative rating on an app.

Few people understand innovation, and the peculiar kinds of innovation practiced in both New York and San Francisco, better than Steven Johnson. The best-selling author has written 10 books that essentially all deal with innovation, and he maintains a home in both places, shuttling his family between each. Steven was the perfect person to launch our inaugural event in our new What’s Now: New York series, an expansion of our highly successful What’s Now: San Francisco series of the last two years.

Adam Werbach, Yerdle Co-Founder, thinks rampant consumerism should be one of the first things to go.The global population is set to reach ten billion by 2100. Humans currently use 60 billion tons of natural resources each year. Yerdle facilitates the exchange of goods online, with the goal of reducing the amount of new goods purchased by one quarter. Werbach believes that cities should join sharing economy companies to organize people who want to share resources. He emphasized the importance of reinventing regulations so that people aren’t left behind in this new iteration of the economy.

Michael Nutter, Former Mayor of Philadelphia has plenty of experience with people clinging to the status quo. “What I say back home is, Philadelphians love change,” said Mayor Nutter. “As long as things can stay the same.” Mayor Nutter believes that city officials should first and foremost remain open to the possibility of disruptive companies that can provide new or better services to their constituents.

Robin Chase, Zipcar Co-Founder, believes the status quo is broken, and that sharing economy platforms—which she refers to as “peers inc”—can help rebuild a new status quo. Chase devised the “peers inc” terminology because of the mutual importance of what she sees as two halves of the sharing economy equation: the platform and the peers. As co-founder of one of the original sharing economy companies, Zipcar, Chase believes that harnessing excess capacity is both attractive economically and vital for the sustainability of our planet.

Michelle Miller, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Coworker.org, thinks that in the not-so distant future, work could mean long periods of short-term employment and short periods of having a single job. By 2020, Miller says, 50 percent or more of workers will be freelancers. Coworker.org, which Miller describes as a digital platform for worker voices, facilitates networking and activism among workers at decentralized workplaces, from Starbucks baristas to Uber drivers.

Casey Fenton, Co-Founder of Couchsurfing, believes that people are fundamentally good and want to help each other. Fenton, who founded Couchsurfing in 2003 as a way to explore the world and meet new people while saving resources, describes Couchsurfing as a “backstage pass to the world.” Fenton views Couchsurfing and Airbnb as “overlapping circles” in that both allow more people to travel and get different perspectives on the world and themselves, while lowering the cost of traveling and decreasing its environmental footprint.

Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and author of Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, believes a universal basic income is the best way for the United States to deal with massive changes in our economy—changes that will only be exacerbated by increasing automation. “If we wanted to appropriately rename the country, we would call it the United States of Anxiety,” said Stern. “Only 21 percent of people think the economy is excellent or very good, despite the numbers to the contrary. Only 47 percent could find $400 in the case of an unexpected bill.” Stern says the purpose of Raising the Floor was twofold: to identify the problem on the horizon, and to ask what we’re going to do about it if the worst should come to pass. He talked about the historical origins of universal basic income, and shared specifics on his own plan, which would involve giving every individual age 18-64 one thousand dollars each month.

Natalie Foster, Co-Founder of Peers.org, is a strong proponent of creating a new social safety net outside the bounds of traditional employment. Foster, who is a Research Affiliate for the Future of Work Initiative at The Aspen Institute, believes that benefits and protections should be portable, prorated and universal. It is increasingly hard to imagine bringing back the unionized jobs that built the American middle class, Foster says. “Work is shifting away from protected jobs and towards service and retail sectors.”