 There's plenty of evidence, numbers as well I guess, that suggests that we need some balance here. Why do we continue to see this happening? So in India, just talking about India, I don't want to just labour that point, but why would the leaders of the country like India who've been through the agricultural revolution, in fact very strong agricultural backdrop, great organic food, small tiny bananas, they taste really yummy, or eggs taste lovely, even the meat tastes good, everything tastes great, and everyone knows. Go get me started about the curries. Yeah, the curries and we have a similar feeling in you know parts of Europe when we go and eat food like even in Italy, you know, the tomatoes are like absolutely just delicious. So we get it and people who consume food and like food, we all get this right, we want better quality food as opposed to some parts of the world where the food just looks big and it's got the right colour and it's awful and there's no taste. And so we know the difference, we all know the difference. So why are people allowing this to happen Charles? I mean I don't understand. Well it's because of ideology and inertia. A lot of, so these politicians and it could be other people who we think have power. Yeah. They feel trapped by the system. If you're a politician and you want to make like a radically different choice, for one thing you've grown up in this system, you're acculturated to it, you're only seeing the things that the systems blinkers allow you to see. And even if you want to deviate from that, you know that if you deviate too far, you're out of there. Or if you're a CEO and you want to change your corporate policies, well you can maybe change them a little bit, but if you change them too much, then what's the board of directors going to say? What are the bondholders going to say? What are the shareholders going to say? What is middle management going to say? What are the suppliers going to say? What are the customers going to say, man I can't really make too big a change. If I make too big a change, they're going to replace me with somebody worse. So it's a system that's taken on a life of its own. And that's why blaming somebody is a false diagnosis. Trying to identify the source of our condition in evil people is a false diagnosis. All that you end up with then following that is you take down the evil people and replace them with somebody else who then becomes evil when they occupy that role. So that's why I have been for 20 years working on the level of the stories, the narratives, the agreements, the mythologies that underlie all of this, the belief systems, the perceptions, the ways of seeing. So for example, when you see things through a quantitative lens and you're a politician and you care and you've been told and immersed in a story that rising GDP is going to increase the quality of life. Well, you know, rising GDP, I mean you're going to have higher GDP when you increase productivity through industrial, agricultural practices. And you get those big, tasteless, nutritionless fruits and vegetables and the cheap factory farmed meat and the GMO corn and soy and all that stuff. Bigger quantity, less labor looks good if you're only looking at those numbers. But the things like the quality of taste or even the nutritional value, like the trace minerals that come from vegetables grown in well-tended soil, none of that is in the metrics. And so that's just one way that, but on a bigger level, it's the hypnosis of the myth of progress and the view of where we came from and where we're going and how to make a good world and how to, and what a good life is. And that's related to the essay you were mentioning. Like we need a completely different vision of what a good life is, what wealth is, what security is. And we can source that different vision from traditional and indigenous cultures and the special moments in modern life that we catch a glimpse of another way of living. For some people, it's like Burning Man, we're a festival. And it's not just a vacation. I'm getting a glimpse here of a future. I'm being shown an aspect of human beingness that feels like home. And I know that we can bring this to the world. How do we do that? Practically, there's no easy answer. I'm not going to give you a formula and tell your listeners just do this and don't do that. Because it depends on your circumstances. But when we're in the consciousness of a new story of what a human being is and what a good life is, then the practicalities become clear. Like the living earth hypothesis, you know, it's like, wow, personally, they maybe support policies of conservation and protection. And maybe I plant a garden. Maybe I take care of soil and water somewhere. Maybe I devote myself to serving life. Maybe I address the political climate and social climate and the psychic climate of which the geological climate is a mirror. Yeah. Do you talk about, I can relate to this, you talk about three things in that essay, localization, degrowth and slowing down. Talk us through each one of those, because I do think it has a pragmatic, there's a pragmatic view around how I, me, us can actually instill some of that new thinking of the narrative in our lives. Yeah, so I visited a community in Brazil called Source Temple. It's a spiritual community or one would maybe give it that label. But what impressed me deeply there, or one thing that impressed me deeply was the architecture. If it can even be called architecture, like none of the buildings actually started with architectural drawings. But they were built mostly by hand, mostly from scavenged and local and up cycled materials. Nothing standardized. Every door handmade and unique, every window unique, sometimes not even square, because they found a piece of glass that may be broken, and they built a window around that. That's not efficient. What's efficient is to make 100 windows identically through an assembly line process, or to buy those windows from somewhere, and buy them with money that you get from your own specialized labor. It's not efficient to do anything by yourself. And some of the building, you know, it's like, man, they could have done that a lot faster, and only a little less beautifully. But somebody was devoted to doing it as it is meant to be done with full devotion. It's like every detail was done with devotion. So you go there, and everywhere you rest your eyes, you're getting devotion reflected back at you and abundance, because what the essence of abundance is the abundance of time. I don't care how much money you have. If you are in a hurry, if you feel like you're you're too busy to enjoy life and to do what you really want to do, you are not rich. Right. Rich means that I am free to do what I want to do. I have time, like wealth of time is the primal form of wealth. And so the fact that somebody took as much time as was needed to make this beautiful and to make this well, that creates an atmosphere of abundance. And I can understand, I'm sure we can all understand, if you're living in an environment without any of that, you're going to feel poor. And maybe compensate for that poverty by acquiring more and more and more of the standard of the generic of the the alienated things created by people you don't even know who don't care about you. Like you feel your life with that stuff, more and more of it in in futile compensation for what you're really seeking. The real wealth I'm speaking about no amount is going to be enough. And you're going to look like you're greedy. Actually, what you are is hungry. There's an unmet need here. And this unmet need rules our society. So D growth might mean saying, you know, actually, we don't need more and bigger. Maybe we need more local, more personal, more intimate, more related, more beautiful. And it would satisfy that need. Like how many pieces how much clothing do you really need? If you have something made for you by somebody who knows you and loves you and thought of you. And it's perfect for you. Maybe you want to wear it all the time. So this is this is just to turn the cult of quantity on its head and the ideology of progress and the our conception of what wealth is. And to recognize that those who we consider poor actually have a kind of wealth. The other definition of wealth is the freedom to be generous. Right. Yeah, I could maybe I won't go into that right now. But but here's a vision of human thriving that doesn't depend on more and more and more, which is hard to reconcile with an economy based on an interest bearing debt created money system, which requires growth. And this infiltrates the corporate space, the business world, where you have to grow or die. Although some companies are rethinking that and and saying, how could we survive and thrive and do good work and and be prosperous without growing? Like that's sometimes a new thought. It's so taken for granted that you grow your shareholder value increases and so forth. But there are other ways to do business. If you're oriented toward something other than wealth or money maximization, and we could maybe, but it's hard to do that in the current economy. Like if you have, you know, bond, bond holders to pay or a bank loan to pay financing costs, you know, you kind of have to grow. So we're talking about a change in the macro economic environment as well. Yeah, that's almost hard for me to imagine that other paradigm, just because we're so entrenched in the current one of the growth model you're describing, on that larger interest bearing level, but also on an individual level. If you look at how we get incentivized at work, we get incentivized by selling more widgets or whatever that is. So even down to the granular level, everyone's bought into that paradigm. And so it's hard to imagine like so much almost, you know, vast majority of companies I know are wired that way. Of course. Yeah, I mean, imagine you're making windows, you know, and one employee is cranking out lots of standard windows and another one's like, man, I only made two windows today, but look, they're really beautiful. And I know that you're not going to actually be able to sell them for more than those hundred windows the other guy made, but man, whoever gets these is going to really enjoy them. Like that that employee is not going to be incentivized. And if he is that company is going to lose market share. Like it's it's hard to go against. And I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is a it requires a leap of courage to do anything for the sake of its beauty and and goodness.