What's up, everybody? My name is Demetric Afinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces,

a podcast that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens get an edge by equipping themselves with the knowledge needed to anticipate the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

By sharing my critical thinking approach and by challenging consensus narratives about the power structures shaping our world, I help you make the connections to see the bigger picture, empowering you to make smarter decisions.

On this week's episode, I speak with Mariana Madzucato, a professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London, where she is founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

She is the winner of numerous prestigious international prizes, including the 2020 John Von Neumann Award, and shares the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All.

She is also the author of three highly acclaimed books, the latest of which is Mission Economy, a moonshot guide to changing capitalism.

In it, Mariana argues that if we want to meet the principal challenges facing us in the 21st century, we need to rethink the capacities and role of government, and above all, recover a sense of public purpose, and I would argue the common good.

We need to be innovative, collaborative, and mission oriented in our thinking, while also taking a stakeholder view of public-private partnerships, which means that when we take risks together, that we also share in the rewards that derive from those risks.

The purpose of today's conversation is to help you think bigger about how we as a community of citizens and nations can mobilize our resources in a way that is bold, inspirational, and oriented towards solving the most wicked social problems of our time.

This means changing government tools and culture, creating new markers of corporate governance, and ensuring that corporations, society, and the government can coalesce around a common set of goals,

ambitions, and objectives.

In the subscriber over time, Mariana and I discuss how the politics of divisiveness impact our ability to work towards mutual shared outcomes.

Why Western society seems to have become more individualistic, and what we can do to shift our cultural awareness towards a more collaborative mindset when it comes to value creation in both the public and private sectors.

And with that, please enjoy this highly engaging and educational conversation with my guest, Professor Mariana Madzucato.

Mariana Madzucato, welcome to Hidden Forces.

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

It's great having you on the program.

As you were saying, we had tried to do this some time ago.

I feel like it was two years ago pre-COVID, and I was supposed to have you in the New York studio, and I insisted, and we were going to find a day in time to do it, but then COVID hit.

That's right. So luckily for you, I keep writing these books, because that was for the previous book.

That's right. It was for the value of everything.

Exactly.

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