Video Three: John Mackey talks with Sounds True Publisher Tami Simon:
“Can Conscious Capitalism solve the world’s problems?”

Tami Simon: Okay John, now just a couple more questions here. You spoke in a very visionary way about how Conscious Capitalism can create an end to poverty potentially in our lifetime.

John Mackey: Capitalism can do that even without Conscious Capitalism. It’s doing a pretty good job of it, but Conscious Capitalism will accelerate it.

Tami Simon: And there are other problems in the world that I am wondering if they can be addressed in your view through business. Do you see a vision of that? I mean for example, you can think about environmental problems and think of the green business movement but we can take it even further to real serious problems of war and terrorism. Does business have a role to play in the alleviating of these problems?

John Mackey: I think a better way to think about it than say, business, is that entrepreneurs can solve all the world’s problems, and I don’t just mean business entrepreneurs. I mean social entrepreneurs. Muhammad Yunus is really not a business entrepreneur, he’s a social entrepreneur. He invented a whole new way of microcredit lending to end poverty. That’s social entrepreneurship. We need social entrepreneurs, we need educational entrepreneurs, we need political entrepreneurs.

I firmly believe that every problem exists in the world, that human beings have the capacity to solve those problems—that our creativity is ultimately limitless. And if we can unleash that creativity and unleash that creativity of entrepreneurs to do good...liberate the entrepreneurial spirit for good, we can solve all those problems.

We need peace entrepreneurs. We just need to release the creativity of human beings and put them to work on these problems. I don’t really have that much faith in bureaucracy solving those problems but I have a lot of faith in the individual creativity in people...of small groups of people.

Of course there will be new problems. That’s the human lot: we solve some problem, we get new problems. But we need to solve the climate problem, we need to solve the war problem. We’ve got some pretty big problems out there. But we’ve got some pretty great, young, idealistic people that I’ve got a lot of faith in, a lot of confidence in.