141: Brave New Capital with Erinch Sahan

Erich, welcome to Political Hope.

Wonderful to be here, Andy.

So let's jump right into it.

What does Political Hope mean to you?

Political hope means we give ourselves the permission and find the courage to design things so that they work.

They work for us, design society, design politics, design economics.

So they work for us and for this wonderful planet we live on.

So for me, hope is about really feeling like things can change and that we have agency and together there's a positive future that's going to emerge.

Yeah, when you say that, I like that you brought up design because we often kind of like outsource design.

And nowadays, AI will design things for us too, right? So when you say design, can you expand on that? What do you mean by design? And can anybody do that? I mean, our economy

is really... a product of design.

I mean, our institutions have been designed, like who has power and how decisions are made, where money goes and what it gets spent on or what it gets invested in, what gets prioritized in terms of outcomes and goals.

know the way we relate to our institutions and they relate to each other the way that um you know the market operates the way laws and and uh legal forms for for for companies and others have been you know created and for funds and events all these are all designed like they're designed through processes that have often tried to optimize for the scarcity of financial capital, that being the sort of central premise of the design.

And it feels like we can design for 21st century challenges now.

Like that's not the primary goal and primary scarcity with designing around.

There's actually a lot of capital flowing around the world that we can design for the realities of this wonderful living planet, this wet rock that spins that we get to inhabit in a beautiful way.

We can design for that and we can design for ourselves to live flourishing lives.

I love that.

I mean, I definitely find that within farming and permaculture, how sometimes we can design with Earth, but she's also designing constantly as well.

So we can also listen and follow the design that's already existing within nature as well.

Absolutely.

I mean, there is a wisdom in the design of Earth and nature.

I mean, the concept of biomimicry has always felt very compelling to me that there's a there's a wisdom that we can tap into and we can lean into and it's a there's a messiness there too but it's not clean and simple you know like there are some very simple and beautiful elements to it but there's competition alongside cooperation and mutualism and shared benefits there's inefficiency sometimes alongside the resilience that that it gets and scrutiny that exists in the best human systems and the best natural systems.

It's an ongoing, it's not a destination.

It's a process of design.

Erich, welcome to Political Hope.

Wonderful to be here, Andy.

So let's jump right into it.

What does Political Hope mean to you?

Political hope means we give ourselves the permission and find the courage to design things so that they work.

They work for us, design society, design politics, design economics.

So they work for us and for this wonderful planet we live on.

So for me, hope is about really feeling like things can change and that we have agency and together there's a positive future that's going to emerge.

Yeah, when you say that, I like that you brought up design because we often kind of like outsource design.

And nowadays, AI will design things for us too, right? So when you say design, can you expand on that? What do you mean by design? And can anybody do that? I mean, our economy

is really... a product of design.

I mean, our institutions have been designed, like who has power and how decisions are made, where money goes and what it gets spent on or what it gets invested in, what gets prioritized in terms of outcomes and goals.

know the way we relate to our institutions and they relate to each other the way that um you know the market operates the way laws and and uh legal forms for for for companies and others have been you know created and for funds and events all these are all designed like they're designed through processes that have often tried to optimize for the scarcity of financial capital, that being the sort of central premise of the design.

And it feels like we can design for 21st century challenges now.

Like that's not the primary goal and primary scarcity with designing around.

There's actually a lot of capital flowing around the world that we can design for the realities of this wonderful living planet, this wet rock that spins that we get to inhabit in a beautiful way.

We can design for that and we can design for ourselves to live flourishing lives.

I love that.

I mean, I definitely find that within farming and permaculture, how sometimes we can design with Earth, but she's also designing constantly as well.

So we can also listen and follow the design that's already existing within nature as well.

Absolutely.

I mean, there is a wisdom in the design of Earth and nature.

I mean, the concept of biomimicry has always felt very compelling to me that there's a there's a wisdom that we can tap into and we can lean into and it's a there's a messiness there too but it's not clean and simple you know like there are some very simple and beautiful elements to it but there's competition alongside cooperation and mutualism and shared benefits there's inefficiency sometimes alongside the resilience that that it gets and scrutiny that exists in the best human systems and the best natural systems.

It's an ongoing, it's not a destination.

It's a process of design.