The FutureSeeds Podcast

We try to be someone, we try to do great things, we strive, we battle, we win and lose. But often we forget why. Why do we do what we do? What is at the core of everything we live for? Nicole Gibson, through her enthusiasm, her faith and her determination, reminds us that Love is the source of Life, the healer, and the message. Nicole Gibson was the youngest ever Commissioner for the National Mental Health Commission in Australia and has taken on many challenges, notably a national tour involving 1,000 workshops in 300 communities. Her work has earned her The Pride of Australia Inspiration Medal, a finalist nomination for Young Australian of the Year and recognition as one of Australia’s Top 100 Most Influential Women. Nicole is a multi-award winning social entrepreneur, however prefers to be seen as a messenger of love.

“You don’t have to try to be special. Your very existence is a miracle."

Nicole Gibson
Author, Speaker, Leader of the "Love Out Loud" Movement

How can we keep a healthy mind in times of crisis? In this interview, Eli and Gangaji offer an invitation into a lesser-known path, one that teaches that surrendering to the raw reality, to the pain, can actually bring us great love and compassion.

“Let your heartbreak be so deep that your compassion deepens"
Eli Jaxon-Bear
Spiritual teacher, founder of the Leela Foundation

In this episode, I allow you to witness and listen to the questions I ask along my way, and the answers I admit to being true. I share a vulnerable moment of my life in which I get up on stage in the role of the student, and speak to Eli and Gangaji, standing as the teachers.

About the speakers
Eli Jaxon-Bear and Gangaji are spiritual teachers and founders of the Leela Foundation. Eli Jaxon-Bear has been trained in many spiritual traditions, from a Zen monastery in Japan to a Sufi circle in Marrakesh, he also ran a clinical hypnosis and neurolinguistics certification program at the Esalen Institute in California in the 80s. His search ended when he was drawn to India in 1990 where he met his final teacher, known as Papaji, a direct disciple of the renowned Indian Sage Ramana Maharshi. Eventually, he was sent back into the world by Papaji to share his unique psychological insights into the nature of egoic suffering in support of self-realization. Gangaji, his partner, traveled to India to meet Papaji in 1990. In her autobiography “Just Like You” she wrote, "The extraordinary event in this life was that I met Papaji. Until then I looked everywhere for the transcendental or the extraordinary, but after meeting Papaji I began to find the extraordinary in every moment." Papaji gave her the name Gangaji, and asked her to share what she had directly realized with others.

Many talk about climate change, but rare are those who dare to speak about its systemic, deeply-ingrained root cause. Depression, unemployment, racism and climate change indeed seem to be all interconnected through the invisible web of the power of multinational corporations. In this interview, Helena-Norberg-Hodge explains to me the history behind it all. She describes with great precision the economical culture that has been destroying our planet and communities for decades, and today threatens our very own survival. Not only that, but she offers an alternative supported by decades of collecting evidence and ground studies, a path which she now calls localization (or decentralization).

Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of Local Futures, a non-profit organization dedicated to the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.

In 1986, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "preserving the traditional culture and values of Ladakh against the onslaught of tourism and development."

In 2011, she produced and co-directed the award-winning documentary film The Economics of Happiness which lays out her arguments against economic globalization and for localization.

And in 2012, she received the Goi Peace Award for "her pioneering work in the localization movement".

The book "Wisdom for a liveable planet" profiled her as one of the eight visionaries changing the world, and The Earth Journal counted her among the world's ten most interesting environmentalists.

Mona green is a certified life-coach and neurolinguistic programming practitioner. She had the opportunity to speak for audiences like the US House of Representatives, Harvard, and the US Department of State, and has been featured in publications like The Washington Post and Teen Vogue. She was also selected by the Obama Administration as a leading change-maker in the fight towards gender equality in 2016. Her clients are very diverse; she’s worked with former Olympic athletes, Hollywood entertainers, European royalty and Navajo Youth and environmental activists in Latin America.

This is the way she describes her business:

Namasme isn’t a traditional coaching company; it was created to serve those who are ready to move on from mindlessly being in the grind and who want to start living life on purpose in purpose. For those who want to be active participants in creating a better, kinder future, not just for themselves but also their communities and the world at large. Our coaching process reflects that.

In this interview, Scott Newton tells us about the philosophy that underlies the work of a facilitator and discloses some of his tools and strategies, as well as the new technologies that are being studied to facilitate the activity of discussing and debating. He also shares with us his successes and failures as a group leader, the worldwide need for facilitators to help with transitions, and why political and financial interests are a bottleneck to positive change happening faster in our world.

Scott is a facilitator and stakeholder engagement strategist. What that means is that it is his job to get very diverse groups of people to discuss, debate and come up with solutions while avoiding conflict. His journey through public relations, communications, recruiting, marketing and consultancy has given him a wide range of tools that he now uses to lead groups through well-designed processes. He has worked for State government, local government, non-for-profit organizations and corporations, and across all sectors - education, health, legal, transport, etc.

Lyn Carson is a professor in applied politics, specialized in deliberative democracy, and the lead researcher at NewDemocracy. NewDemocracy’s mission is stated as follows: “NewDemocracy is an independent, non-partisan research and development organization; we aim to discover, develop, demonstrate, and promote complementary alternatives which will restore trust in public decision making”

In this interview, we talk about a number of different topics related to democracy, and I found it truly impassioning because Carson delivers insight into the structural changes and the processes that are necessary to harness public intelligence and decide altogether of our future. She details the difference between direct and deliberative democracy, and the importance of critical thinking versus opinion polls.

Everything in our world is changing, including the world of business. In 2015, the UN disclosed the Sustainable Development Goals framework, 17 goals created as a guide for the world of business. Amazingly enough, in 2019, the director of the chamber of commerce said that the SDGs are the biggest business opportunity of the century.
Discover how the world of business has been impacted by this change of culture by listening to my interview with Paul Dunn.
Paul is a four-time TEDx speaker, award-winning entrepreneur and master presenter. He is the founder of B1G1: Business for Good, a company that has conceived a system that enables every business on the planet to transform their company culture, by changing the way they measure their success. 
What if businesses measured their success not in dollars but in "giving impacts" - meaning the positive impact they have in the world? B1G1 created an all-in-one solution for businesses to measure their goals differently, fund high-impact projects all around the globe and market their impact directly on their website thanks to an integrated widget.

Aren’t movies about the future always gloomy and dark? "2040" isn’t one of them. "2040" is a movie created by award-winning film director Damon Gameau to broadcast a different story, a different narrative about the Future. He and a researcher interviewed a hundred different academics, researchers and scientists, to collect hundreds of different solutions to the world's problems, and then traveled to 15 different countries to film these solutions.

“We work for a global system change, from war to peace, from exploitation to cooperation, from fear to trust.”