 Hello again. So this month's book, well it's the end of the tax year so I thought a particularly interesting thing would be to look at finance and of course Britain's also in this kind of Brexit process. So my book of choice today, which is one that I was introduced to a few years ago and I loved, still love as a book, it's called Sacred Economics. It's by Charles Eisenstein and it was the first book of his that I was introduced to by someone who came on one of my permaculture courses and they very much recommended it and they said that it was available as a free PDF. You can actually just download it for free off the internet which is making a point that essentially we live in a gift economy from the perspective of nature that Charles very succinctly points out around that you know we didn't earn the sun, we didn't earn the air we breathe, we didn't earn the trees and the plants or any of those things the water they're just here we're born into a world where all of those things are given to us and so he introduces or reintroduces us to the idea of the gift economy and how for many many millennia humans have behaved just like the rest of life in that things effectively are there for free and you might have to stake a claim to a territory for instance but we had no money we had no ownership on any of those things and that somewhere along the way we invented money as way of allowing us to make what feels like a fair trade in a moment when we started to move from a world where we knew the people around us and so we had trust in our community and it felt that if one person did something for another then at some point in the future that favor would be returned and then we started living in a world where we traveled more and we met people once in a lifetime and we might have an exchange with those people where we would have to find a way of balancing that exchange and so along comes money in order to help us to do that to enable us to put a value on things and such but it's a fascinating book what I particularly like about Charles because money obviously is something nearly all of us use and it's something that we're all we all have feelings about in one way or another some of us have much more than others and Charles really is in this book is looking at how do we do money better effectively how do we create a better way of making those exchanges with each other and so it's another one of those books that lacks pictures so here we are you can see it's all writing and you know perhaps with a bit more editing it could be a smaller book it is quite a chunky book I remember when I first got this because I like paper you know for me the internet is great it gives us access to so much but at the same time it's potentially fragile and the power goes off while I lose a connection and I no longer have access to the internet my copy of the book and so on so I bought a paper copy because I like paper you can see I like books and so um so I had this one and I had another book which I wouldn't name around the theme of economics as well which was about half of the stick and uh and I was going to lead some of the training for a permaculture meeting so I thought well I'll take the one that's less heavy because I didn't have to carry it around so I took this other book with me and tried reading it but it was really hard work and not very interesting um and then I came back later and I read this one and I was completely enthralled so no pictures but fascinating and what I particularly like about Charles is that in this book he answers all those questions um very intelligently that we might ask that we don't like to ask which is why would all the people with all the money or all the land share that back out again with the people that don't have it and he gives very good reasons why that would be a good idea for everybody so um it's just it's a very interesting book because money is something that makes many things possible it made it possible for technological processes to make things like this camera and the internet to happen in the first place but also in our modern world it's created a lot of inequality so this is all about how do we do it better and I could also recommend his earlier book The Ascent of Humanity which touches on money a bit in here as well amongst other things and he's also written another book subsequently the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible which I've yet to read ironically but this one I would definitely say start with this one you can get it for free as a pdf if you want just download it there's there's two websites called Sacred Economics they're both actually good um but Charles Eisenstein is the book that I'm recommending here and um get it for free or buy a copy um you'll love it he writes beautifully and he answers all those important questions highly recommended