Hello and welcome to the profit meets Impact podcast, where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey, and I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. Well, it is a pleasure and an honor to have Austin Choi Fitzpatrick on the show today. Awesome. Beyond being a friend and an amazing guy, he is a California based author, artist and educator. He is professor at the University of San Diego's Crock School of Peace Studies, where he is also the director of their Master of Arts program in Social Innovation. He is also the co chair of the Gilder Lehrman Center's working group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale University. He installs large scale sculptures with art builds which I've seen and are amazing.

He writes books about culture and politics, including the most recently wicked Problems. And wow, you have such a resume. I'm kind of out of breath saying that all. Austin, man, it is such a, such a pleasure to be having you in this conversation.

I'm so excited to be here. I think we're going to talk about all sorts of fun and cool things. It's good to see you. Good to be here. Thank you.

I know, Austin, if anything's true between us, our conversations are always interesting and always meandering.

I love it.

So I think where we started this conversation, or one of the reasons why I want to chat with you is around this concept of social innovation. Obviously, on this podcast, a lot of what I focus on is how businesses use social innovation to drive profit and drive change. And I know you're tackling a part of social innovation as well. It's really something that's important to you. Obviously, it's a piece of your work, but I wanted to pause really quickly on that piece and really try to understand. You have such a unique background, just a lot of varied perspective to understand what are all the experiences you had that really led you up to the point to see social innovation as something that's important in other world needs?

Yeah, it's a great question. I wouldn't ordinarily cast myself if you asked me to draw a circle around the work that I do. Your intro, your generous intro, sort of showed this range of things that have captured my attention. If you had to, if you asked AI to describe what all that is, I don't know if chat GPT would say, oh, that is social innovation. And so in some ways, I feel like I've backed into this. This field and where I've come from, to answer your question, is a deep curiosity about not just what's wrong with the world, but what's right in the world and what works between humans and where it is that we together can harness creativity in order to create new systems, new norms, new institutions, in order to make the world a better place. And I feel like I come from the human rights world. I come from the social movements world.

And both of those two areas, social movements and human rights, are both really organized around problems and trying to address problems as they're happening, like, to stop harms from happening. And I've done work, written a couple of books in that space, and wanted to change gears and start asking questions about creativity, innovation, about more generative approaches to working together, not just to block the pipeline or stop the law or pass the law or recognize new rights and identities, but also to proactively construct the kinds of, again, like institutions, norms, and ideas that look more like the world we'd like to live in. And so that I think I kind of stumbled backward from there in those interests into something that we would now call, or I would now describe as social innovation.

And that's a. I'm appreciating that shift. I also appreciate a lot of the time that you spent researching, I guess, some of the darker sides of the world. And I can see this polar side of focus so much on the problems. What are some of the solutions? I want to explore a little bit about your background, because one of the things that you have studied is slavery and indentured servitude. And we think about the economy. That's obviously a really big piece that has. That it is driven by the economic engine.

Right. So I'm kind of curious, you know, through that process, like, what, what are some of the things that you've learned about the economy? Where are some of the insights that you gleaned that maybe started to push you more towards the solution side, but just. Just kind of curious to hear a little bit about that experience.