 Greetings, earthlings. Take me to your leader. Oh, I guess that's sort of old school. It is January 13, 2022. We have a really cool topic today, money, which leads into other topics really quickly, like value and values and a whole bunch of other things. Grace is going to take us through it. I will step back and enjoy the proceedings. Grace, pull me in when you want me to, but I will leave it to you as you wish on the call. I share the link in the matter most of the Miro board that Johan kindly set up for us, which I'm now going to share in the Zoom chat so that everybody has it. And I'll probably paste it a couple of times as we go, but we will wander around in there. And if you want to guide us on what to do there, I would love that as well, so we don't all trample the flowers. And thank you for doing this. Sure. So I have a Miro disability. And so I won't be able, I won't be guiding any Miroing. I can kind of orientate myself to it, but it isn't my choice. Did you create what's there now about money, the circle and the squares? Did not create anything log in or any of that? Oh, okay. So I thought that was you. It turns out that was probably Johan. All right. Oh, look at that. Function of money. Oh, look at all this stuff here. Okay. I know. I was like, and then I wrote back, Grace, love what you've done with the place. So. Oh, yeah. Mm hmm. I love what I haven't done with the place as well. Cool. So one of the things that I said, I mean, I was really interested in the back and forth in the chat and the discussion and all of that. And it's mostly not what I'm going to talk about today. But I didn't want to change it because people were having such a good time talking about stuff. And I'm going to start with a couple of premises so that you might not agree with the premises that I'm going to start with. But for the thought experiment that we're going to do for the next 90 minutes, unless they're incredibly offensive premises, I'm just going to ask you to accept the premises so that we can kind of stay on this inquiry because the inquiry is really about the future. And though the first premise is money was invented, and like all human inventions, it will become outdated. And, you know, it's not like we weren't born with it. It isn't like an appendix, which might also be outdated. Who knows? But, you know, it's just an invention and it will become outdated. And we're also at a point in history where it looks like it's not functioning optimally for everybody, maybe for some people, yes, but not for everybody on the planet. And so it's worth taking a look at if money were to become outdated or replaced by some other concept or technology, depending on what you think it is a concept of technology. If you're Yuval Noah Harari, you think it's a fairy tale. But what is it doing so that if we were to invent something new, what would we need to replace in order for that new thing to be useful? And Leif already has a hand up. Did you want to say something, Leif? Or Leif, you raised your hand and you're muted. She has nothing to say. He's just the kind of person who wants he doesn't know that he's not trying anything. He's showing us this hand. So psychologically, we feel more safe with him. I understand. Okay, good. So fantastic. So that's one that's that's the premise. Also, I do a little, I do a workshop where I go through what are, you know, this question, what are the purposes of money? What does money do? And that takes quite a while. And I think that it's much more interesting for me to start with the things that I've already identified, you can add to the list that money is doing in our society today, so that we can go from there and say, okay, what is that going to look like? And I'll also talk a little bit about, you know, where where I feel the most, the most stuff. And so let's see, now I shall try sharing my screen and hopefully it'll work as wonderfully as it did before. And also, the other the other disability I have is that I can't read the chat and present at the same time. It's hard. Right. So somebody needs to say something urgently, they can jump in or maybe Jerry will jump in if there's something needs to be addressed as I'm speaking. Sounds great. Okay, here we go. So the first thing is that we say that money is a store of value. And perhaps at one time it was or trans in exchange of value transfer value. And this is a picture of fish because at the time when money was invented by human beings, we thought it was impossible to fish all the fish in the sea. And so we had this concept that food was scarce, fish were abundant. And now the technologically we've we've come to a point where the opposite is true. The things that we thought were scarce, like, you know, how are you going to get some food, have become abundant. And the things that we thought were abundant, like air, plenty of air, plenty of free water, no problem, have become scarce. And so that money in many aspects. And so what we're calling right now, externalities, for example, we don't value air, which to me is the most important thing. I just can't go out without it for a few minutes. And without getting upset, you know, so air, which is the most valuable thing to me as a human being has become completely devalued in our current monetary system. So that's, that's not great. But it's a consequence of the time at which we invented it. So it's not like money is evil or bad, it's just we invented it at a time where our problems were completely different. And so what we call valuable was mislabeled. You know, maybe we lived in a tribe or with a lot of people on top of one another. So the idea of, you know, being touchy-feely with people and having close relationship was like, you know, I'd like a little less of that, please. And now we live in these boxes where we don't have enough human interaction. So that's the first, I guess, second presence, right? And then, you know, the next thing is like, well, if we have enough stuff in the crypto industry, and just generally, like all this game, these stuff, it's like, we'd love to live in this world without money, like the Star Trek world. But we haven't solved the problem that the Star Trek world has solved, which is you just say computer makes me a cup of old gray tea and then like it materializes, right? So, so without having solved that problem, we need to solve that because that solves a lot of problems. Like how do I get all my stuff? I just tell the whatever the ionizer or whatever they call it to make me some tea and it appears out of nowhere. So we have to solve some other problems. So here are the things that I have identified that money is doing today. One is it replaces relationships. I can get somebody to give me dinner without being nice to them and knowing them at all. I just, I sit down, I guess, I can get a hotel room, I can get all kinds of things without having to be even nice because I'm with the money, they smile at me, all good. And also, you might notice that if you tried to tip your mom for making you a meal, it would deteriorate the relationship, not add to the relationship. So it replaces that. We now use it for appreciation as well, we tip people to show them that we appreciate them. And that's very different from really feeling appreciated. I mean, if somebody really appreciates us, you did a great job tonight at, you know, taking care of me at the restaurant. It's very different than I just tip you a lot because maybe I'm from New York and they tip more in New York, right? Doesn't necessarily mean I was awesome. Reward for competence and contribution. So, you know, very wealthy people, we say they've added more value to the world and that's why they have more money. And they also use it in certain ways, like if I to signal how great they are by buying a Lamborghini or whatever it is, certain kinds of clothing and places to live to show how significant and how competent and how meritocritous they've been by showing off these monetary things. And again, that's that's not the only way that we do it. And it's also not really representative in the same way of look, if you've got an Olympic gold medal, you could sell it. But the person who buys it isn't an Olympic gold medalist. And so it's not exactly a one to one alignment. We use it for exchange and survival. I'm not saying we don't use it for exchange, I could buy food with it, I can buy shelter with it. Coordination of large scale activities. And this is the one that I think I have the most trouble imagining how in the world, can we coordinate these large scale activities, so that I could have, you know, this right, like how am I going to get this without money and this. And although I do know that most of the information that goes into building this is not monetary information. Right? Every step of the way somebody was checking the supply chain and who's got this and getting multiple bits and looking at the quality and where does this come from. So I know that money isn't even the primary information flow that went into making this. But it's the primary way that people were willing to do that thing for me, whatever that thing was, right? And to me, this is the hardest thing, right? Because as I mentioned, like appreciation and rewards and trust, we can we can probably find other constructs for that. But that one's really hard. And then distribution of resources. This is the one I like to use the most for it's like the simplified one. It's like, nobody can argue that some resources were redistributed into my hands. Like it's very clear to me that money redistributes resources. But then you can ask, Okay, well, this, you know, I need this, I'm not going to argue about that. But like this pink eraser here, it's like, well, where did the pink colorings come from? And is, you know, was it really a good move of resources from some place? So that my eraser could be pink, instead of, you know, may would end up gray color or ugly or something. But was that a good redistribution of resources? One of my favorite examples for that is the backlighting on your keyboard. Like if you add up all of the backlighting on everybody's keyboard all around the world, it's really clear that that was not a really effective, efficient, or important reallocation of resources. Because if you try to turn off the backlighting on your keyboard, it's so silly. Anyway, and if you wanted to redistribute resources, so people, you know, have enough food, we're not doing a good job of that. Right. So money isn't redistributing resources for maximum human survival. And then the final one is security for the future. So that's something like insurance or my retirement fund or those kinds of things, which traditionally were kept inside community. Traditionally, your community took care of you. And but now we use money as a substitute for, you know, I'll take care of my parents when they get old, I'll, I'll have money and I'll put them in a home or something like that, or they'll have to save their own damn money and get themselves a home when they get old. So it's instead of this kind of relational thing, we're using it as security for the future. So those are really that's kind of the starting points. Like, as you look at this list of things that you use money for, if you were going to think of a new invention, what would it look like? What types of ways would we want to interact with people that would create better distribution of resources, more appropriate distribution of resources and coordination of activities that would reach whatever goal you have? Like, what is the goal that we're looking at as the, you know, whatever it is, community, right? Game B or whatever you want to call that. And what would be better means of achieving this? So that's kind of the inquiry that I'm in. And I'll put these, these things in the chat. And then I'm just going to open it up for kind of a discussion, either of what I've presented or of how you would envision these different functions being filled without money, if we have it. Sounds great. Grace, thank you. Whoever'd like to jump in, jump in. And someone's talking in the background somewhere. So, Grace, hi, this is great intro, kind of fundamental question. And I think I know your answer, right? I just want to confirm it. Do you have a position on, here's these goals, obviously, that we want to go towards some of which are we now get from conventional fiat money, some of which money as we now do it, not doing so well, not protecting the truly scarce resources like air, and not managing the sustainability or, or future survival. Do you think that there are solutions? Well, it's hard to frame this in a way that doesn't bias the discussion. Like, if you moved away from fiat money as a, as the solution, or do you think there's some other fixes, there's a range of fixes, and some of them involve fiat money, and some of them involve some of them involve combinations. So I have a couple of philosophical ways of approaching that one is evolution transcends and includes. So, you know, however smart I am, we all say that that thing. So I could say that thing, you know, and then we'd all be like, yeah, transcends and includes it will money will continue to be. So that's one potential answer. Personally, I'm very interested in non non monetary solutions as a playground for the experiments that I'm working on. Yeah. But I know it's only part of the solution. Can you give us an example of what counts as a non monetary solution in your books? Yeah, so I'm actually working on reputation economy. And the easy example is couch surfing. Right. So if you used to belong if you belong to couch surfing, and you have a good reputation, you can find a place to stay anywhere you go, based on your reputation. Jerry, there's also a lot of really nice historic examples. For example, in the Algonquian tribes of the Northeast, any surplus from hunt or gathering or whatever went into long houses, and the elder women of the tribe allocated it back out to whoever needed it in the tribe. And it worked just fine. But there's lots and lots and lots of schemes that we've forgotten paved over gotten rid of because money creates this distance between us. And Grace, I was really happy when you said that money sort of replaces relationships and don't remember exactly how you said it replaces relationships and trust because for me, money is this alienating thing. If I have a lot of money, I don't need to, I can cocoon away. I can sort of, I can sort of just trade this funny little object that people are happy to take and get something done or given to me without needing to build a relationship or know who that person is or anything like that. And that's, I don't think that's been necessarily good for society. And I agree with you that having like a little slab of unobtainium with which you can do zoom videos around the world is like insane. And I love the thought experiment of could we have gotten there without a money thing? So I love these questions that are in the air. And we have a bunch of people with their hands up. So let's go Stuart Klaus. Yeah, just a simple statement. We all we need some medium of exchange to facilitate interaction and transactions. I think we need some medium of exchange and you know, and it could be even in the in the example of the Native American tribe, you just used Jerry, it could be need, who need something. But is that a medium of exchange? It's just an it could be, could be, could be the way I think it's, it's what is the value, the meaning that we are trying to facilitate in some ways. In other words, inherently, there's nothing bad about money. But all of those things that Grace just mentioned, have a kind of a negative assessment or value to it as I as I as I listen. And it's because of what we've done. Because of the value system that we created behind money. So, and, you know, one of the examples I want to use is in the legal profession, you know, everybody thought it was a, at least I thought it was a place of service. That was why I was attracted. That was why I went into it. And then in the early 1970s, a guy by the name or the late 1970s, a guy by the name Steven Brill, created this whole monetary value about how they were measuring profit per partner, and what was the largest law firm, and it completely changed the profession into one of a commercial entity as opposed to being a place of service. Now that may be my ideal. Maybe it was always like that. But I think the value behind things are much more important than whatever you call this medium of exchange. Yeah, I'm gonna, I think it's a really good question, like, do we need a medium of exchange? And I think what's interesting is how we define exchange, right? Because in the way that money is used is that supposedly we're even Steven after the exchange, right? You do the service, I give you this, we're even. And so if you use exchange in that way, it's clear that that's not really how we run our relationships, right? And that's why Jerry says it's kind of like anti-relationships. I have a relationship when I kind of feel you owe me one or I owe you one, you're always doing more for me than I really needed. And, you know, so, so exchange is very specific. And I don't think we have a very good definition of it. And then the other thing is value, like, hmm, that's hard to define. Small ethnographic side note, I've forgotten where this was, but in a sociology reading long ago, there's a, there's a country or a region where the custom when somebody moves into the neighborhood is you go over and you give them a gift of some bread or something else. And then they're supposed to reciprocate. But they're not supposed to reciprocate in the same amount in this in an equivalent quantity. They're supposed to under or over reciprocate so that there's always an inequality in the balance so that you haven't, you haven't wiped the slate sort of mentally. And mental accounting and gift giving is another sort of bad thing, I think. And that goes back to Marcel Maus and a bunch of stuff around gifts and Lewis Hyde. But this idea that there should always be a little open inequality between us because that maintains the tie is really sweet. And and money tends to obliterate. I remember when when fast track came into the Bay Area. And I could no longer pay for the toll for the person behind me. And I'm like, God, that sucks. There was a little gesture I could do. Of course, the tolls kept going up. But there's a little gesture I could do that was nice with among humans that is now gone because because automation. And I was paying money tolls, right? This wasn't about money as much as it was about automation. Stuart, do you want to jump back in? Or if not, will you take your hand down? And you're muted? I did, but I lost my thought while you were. Oh, no, I'm so sorry. It's okay. Come back in. Let's go. Klaus Pete Leif. Yes, thank you, Grace, for for very late. Oh, sorry, I'm muted. The order is actually Klaus Pete, then you. Okay, I wait. Good. Okay, good. So the along the same line of thinking at stewardship, there is a great deal of interest in local currencies. And in fact, the Presencing Institute, when they developed their innovation hub concept, the winning entry was blockchain based value exchanges. Could that be an interim, at least, transitionary solution to have community development take place around a local currency that that facilitates this value exchange, basically keeping track and record exchanges that that so it's a it's a simplified exchange means that that also allows all kinds of other control mechanism, right? Because you can, you can limit the currency to specific products to specific participants and so on. Would that be? Would that be an option? My observation empirically is no. I mean, we've been playing with community currencies for hundreds of years and the let systems and mutual credit and the Bristol pound and the Brickston pound and Sardex in Sardinia and Grassroots Economics. And my observation has been that it hasn't led to the next system. It's reduced debt, increased commerce in some places, it's really led to amazing outcomes. But what it's generally led people to do is go back to that it's led, it's mostly led people who didn't have enough money in the first place, either as a stopgap, you know, when there was no local, you know, there was stopgap because we don't have enough money, or there was a crisis or whatever. But generally speaking, historically, what has been observed is that those end up going back into the CS system. So they're like a detour rather than a bridge across. I'd like to wish they were but empirically, the evidence seems to point that they do not do that. And you don't see them as a transition system either? After, no, after several hundred years, it seems that what they do is they transition cash for cash for economies into the general economy. They transition you back into the general. That's what I just what I'm seeing everywhere that people have tried it. Just ask a question, Grace. So I don't know if you've thought about this, you probably have actually, but the distinction between value and worth that is put made, especially in service thinking. And it seems to me that lurking, lurking in some of the comments we've been hearing is an assumption that things have value or that the sub value is somehow ascertainable, independent of of use. And of course, that's that use versus inherent worth has been around as a discussion point in philosophy for a very, very long time. But I think the the service thinking, the new service dominant logic thinking, that sort of thing claims that worth the value is co created in use. And and when you just sort of stop there, the question is if you and I haven't stopped to think this through because it's hard, but the if you substitute for each of the your wonderful list of things, starting to thinking from a point of view of what something's worth. I mean, here's an example, an easy example, you know, I might it might be worth a lot of money to me to to get a prom dressed in in in, you know, ahead of the prom, right? And and then let's suppose, which actually happened to me that I didn't end up getting invited to the prom, but I had the dress. How much is that dress now worth? And and I think those those things they vary, they change over time, depending on the context. And suddenly, the the the value of the, you know, the value true value of it wasn't created, they would say in the service service size, true value wasn't created, because it wasn't it wasn't used and it wasn't used for the purpose that it was. You could create something else with it. You know, you could create a quilt. I mean, you could all kinds of things ways to do that. But if you hold that distance between value and worth, some languages don't have that precise distinction, but you can get around that. Have you thought that through? Yeah. Um, well, the whole idea value strikes me as a euphemism. Right? Like, what, what does that even mean? So you talked about the prom dress, but like, you know, what's value of being a parent? Are you a good parent or a bad parent? You know, is that valuable? Or even just even just being a biological parent, obviously has a lot of values and if you're a crappy parent, I mean, somebody got alive. So in the value, this idea of value to me is very, is very fuzzy. So if you put yourself on a value word diet, I always find that helpful. That's what I've done. When I want to change my thinking is just take it out, take it out of your lexicon for a while. Can you get out of some of these puzzles? Well, so I pretty much am out of about, you know, I pretty much don't use that. But I do use the word value. Right? What do you value? And so when I'm looking at what I'm calling this reputation economy, my cat has negative value I have to pay for her. I don't know why I do that. Anyway, so, so what I look at is what do you value, right? So if I'm going to share something with you, let's say as a sharing economy, like Jerry was going to say, in an economy where I'm sharing food that I can't eat that's going to go bad, I give it to any human being and even my cat, right? Like, if somebody's hungry, I want to give them food that nobody would eat and it's going to go bad. But if I was going to share my medical services, I would want to know something about their philosophy about medicine, you know, are they, you know, whatever it is, they don't take medications or, you know, they believe in do so whatever their values are about medicine might matter to me whether I'm going to share my medical services with them. So I think about values. But I don't think about value. And I think that in some ways, the way you treat people, of course, when you're talking about having an interaction or commercial or barter or just sharing interaction, a lot of that has to do with your values. Let's go Pete Leif, Doug. Thanks, Ray. And thanks, Grace. Um, I wanted, I kind of wanted to branch off from John's, what John asked a while ago, which was, so is there an, is there is an alternative to fiat money? And one of the things that I feel like we, we haven't quite gotten around to in this conversation is the fact that one of the cool things that happened when we nationalize money. And a country said, you know, okay, US dollars are going to be legal tender throughout the United States, and you can use them for everything. And we're going to really discourage anything else besides US dollars. A cool thing that happens is that that currency becomes fungible for everything, right? I can get paid a certain number of dollars from my time, I can pay somebody a certain number of dollars for a bag of carrots, I can pay somebody a certain number of dollars to live in a shelter for a month is all dollars, right? So the really cool thing is we collapse all these different kinds of value streams into this one, one, one value stream, just dollars. And that means that, you know, I can do different things. I could sell my, my, my old gadgets or something for dollars and buy food with them. I could work for dollars and buy gasoline with it. Running everything through dollars has this really tremendous value to the to the system. So one of the flip sides of that though is that we've forgotten that there's kind of multiple kinds of value, you know, there's the value of being able to live in the house. There's the value of having health. There's the value of being happy. There's the value of growing up safe and secure. There's the value of being able to breathe clean air. All these things are actually kind of different. And when we have this habit of turning everything into how about if we just call that dollars, right? How many dollars is it worth that? I won't die in a car crash. Or how many dollars is it worth that? I can, I can pull a certain amount of carbon or keep a certain amount of carbon from going into the air. And then it's like, seriously, guys, we're starting to value lives and breathability and stuff like that in dollars. What the heck happened, right? So back 10, 15 years ago, when we started to get finance that was a little bit more more person friendly, we started having something called triple value accounting triple triple bottom line, right? And I always thought this was really cool, because it's like, wow, instead of just one thing, you could have three things and the three things were people and planet and profit, right? Let's make sure the socialness is taken care of. Let's let's make sure that people can breathe air and animals can live and and then we won't die because there aren't any honey bees and stuff like that. And then, yeah, let's have another value chain, which is just making money for folks, right? So there was a big shift from it was a big thing at the time, right? It's like, wow, we could have triple bottom line, we can actually have companies that have three balance sheets instead of one balance sheet. And part of what they're going to be doing is making the world a better place or they're going to make make be making things better for people. So I always thought that was really cool. But it also like keep going, you know, what I think what we want to do is have lots of value streams and and and not try to collapse everything into the middle. So so I one of the one of the examples is but on the country has got the gross national happiness score, they keep track of how happy their country is. And I don't know if that's been successful or not, but it's it's a it's a it's a a convenience, I have a huge convenience that we've collapsed everything through USD or whatever the national currency is. It's also a huge, you know, everything turns into a this single value thing, which, which is just silly. So I think kind of what happened there, it's it reminds me of a couple other systems where if you imagine yourself 500 years ago, the way that you could keep track of money is with tokens, right? Paper money or coins or something like that. And that meant that if they were at least hard to hard, hard to counterfeit, you could distribute these physical tokens over the whole country and people could exchange them and things like that. In this day and age, we've got different technologies. We've got we've got distributed ledgers now where you can keep track of value in a way that's not centralized in any one server. But you can keep track of, I'm going to say a dirty word here, you can keep track of a Bitcoin as as it goes in and out of a distributed ledger, right? So I can buy a bit Bitcoin and I can give somebody to get Bitcoin and they can and they can exchange value with the ledger all in a distributed way. So this is this is a replacement essentially for the fact that we used to have to do this physically with pieces of silver or gold or or fancy paper that had anti counterfeitering mechanisms on them. So we've got technologies now that let us do similar kinds of things in different way. And it's also easy, it would have been really hard to walk around the United States or or Finland or whatever country you were in and have a bag full of not only the local currency, the national currency, but a couple other currencies, one that tracked my happiness, one that tracked the health of the health of the bears and the ecosystem and all that kind of stuff. That would have been a nightmare to have a bag full of, you know, 10 or 20 or 100 different kinds of coins. But nowadays with digital technology and distributed ledgers, that's not really that hard. So we have kind of the capability to do things in a different way, just in the same way that back in the olden days, we had trouble keeping track of how people voted. So we came up with the idea of the electoral college as a way of kind of centralizing voting stuff. And then now we've got got ourselves stuck on the idea that that's the best way to vote is to kind of throw away everybody's personal votes and just have somebody who votes by proxy for you and you don't even know who they are and you don't you don't really trust them. Same thing we kind of did. I'm trying to run through a couple different metaphors for how we can replace old technology with new technology. Another one that stands out for me is brand names. If you think of McDonald's or if you think of this this works better if you think of it when we were kids 40, 50 years ago. But it used to be that, you know, you would go to a new town. And if you wanted to make sure that you were getting quality food, you would look for a Denny's or a Hojo or Donald's or whatever. Nowadays, we we can kind of replace that. Maybe some of you have started to replace that. Nowadays, my my daughter goes into a new town and we're looking for a taqueria. She the first thing she does is not like, oh my gosh, what's what's the brand name of of taco shops that we trust Taco Bell or whatever. She pulls out Yelp and Yelp says Yelp has a bunch of reviews for the best taco places. So she can find a better taco place than Taco Bell. Because we have this again kind of a distributed ledger Yelp is not really distributed, but it's got a ledger system which lets people keep account of local restaurants in a way that my daughter wouldn't know if she just landed in town and would have to rely on on a on an old brand name. She can rely on a new technology, which is a review. So somewhere in here, multiple value streams, and new technologies, we can we actually have the capability to do this kind of stuff. It's it's really hard to shift cultures. It's not easy to do. But I think a way out a way forward, the alternate coming back to John's question, is there alternative for fiat? It's actually kind of what you want to do is I think that the alternative we're searching for is not, you know, I want I want a different kind of the same kind of money. It's I want to account for value in different ways. And I want to figure out what's important when I'm accounting for value. And I don't want to coalesce all the value accounting into a single bottom line dollars. And that's why I like this inquiry because we now have the technology to do these things. That's why this inquiry is so interesting. Because it's not theoretical. We could actually do it. Agreed. Leif Doug Stewart. And we can hear me. Yes, just fine. Thank you. Great for a very good start. This was a very good and interesting overview. And what we just heard about was the new help ledger and the ledger as a way forward. But I do think we could also look for another perspective. And the way forward could be called navigate. And navigate is actually not two dimensional. It's at least three dimensional, perhaps seven dimensions. But if you start with the development way forward from the traditional economics, which is two dimensions, and it's very much input output. And what we have learned during the last couple of decades is actually its input impact. And impact is very close to what we just touched on. It's the it goes beyond the replacement value. But what I started to prepare for the chat with Grace was, have you looked into the history of money in the aspects of talent? And as you know, in the old Middle East, they were actually trading with talent as a currency. And talent was a weight measure, a unit of weight. And today, we're totally different in the perspective, how heavy is your head? How many kilos do you have between the ears? And that is usually regarded as the talent value. But when you look at sports people, they have a tremendous kilo price for their head or their feet, or some of the muscles. So the talent unit is leading to a lot of the historical interesting perspectives, as I see it. And I would like to add to your list of the very good list that you had talent, talent or talent, as the Hebrew word is talent. But it's a unit of weight. And therefore, it is probably a little bit of standstill, I would like to have the unit of not going forward. And that is a much more tricky unit of measurement. If you have a standstill, or if you have a balance sheet or ledger, that is more or less standstill, because it's the balancing point. But what you're looking for is the imbalance. And the future is in the handling the imbalance with a clever view. And that is navigation. I stopped there. Grace, any thoughts on that? No, that was, that was really an interesting perspective. Thanks, life. Let's go to Doug Stewart Gil Forrest. I'm wondering if it's worth unpacking the idea of inventing money. I think the anthropology says that getting to money was a really complicated but intuitive process. I started out by pointing at my cow. And you've got one. People probably noticed that and could do this. So they get to and so we keep going on until we get a digital system. Hey, that's pretty cool. But it's not so much an invention as a discovery of correspondences. And that system then expands out and we don't know what the history is, from the digitalization to a more complicated system. So we have an Athens. The word money comes from monad, which is the treasury at the bottom of the Parthenon, where grain and coin was stored. And the idea of the system was that soldiers were paid in this, who could go out and buy food from peasant farmers, who could then use the money to come back into town and buy things. So you got a virtual cycle. That probably took a lot of time to figure out. But what we have now is really a tweaking on that system, which is a combination of being grounded in real stuff, and mixed up with the psychology of our ability to do abstractions. And then we add to that exploitation and looking for opportunities. We get to the current system. But I think the anthropology and details of that history are really interesting. And get us away from the idea that money is some kind of mystical thing. Don. Thanks, Don. Stuart Gil Forrest. Yeah, thank you. What I wanted to say before was that it's a fascinating conversation because we're using all of these words and what do these words actually mean? And everybody can have a whole lot of different definitions of the words. It's like the word value, you know, what popped back up in my mind was value is what someone is willing to give for something. And that's a it's a very subjective, subjective thing. But the point that I wanted to make was that whatever system we devise, whatever game we devise depends upon people acting in some sense with integrity and following following the system, because that creates a level of trust, which is a critical piece. If we look at what happened in our in our political system in the US, all of a sudden this guy Trump comes along, and he is a total wildcard, not acting in the way people expect and not acting in a way people have traditionally acted. So the conversation around what system of money depends upon what it is that we want to. And this is in a lot of the examples that people use, what's the value that we want to emphasize as as as something that's worth something, you know, like, like, you know, we talk about air, which was a great example, Grace, the importance of it. How do we create a system that puts that at the top of the hierarchy, because without it, nothing, nothing is meaningful at all. So thank you. Thanks to go ahead, Grace. Yeah, and I think so, you know, when you talk about a game, this is sort of the perfect thing to kind of slow down the thinking a little bit and say, well, what is the purpose of the economy? Right? What is it's not it's like, we're playing a game. And until now, in case, case of a lot of talks about this, she studied economics, and they're like the purpose of the economy is to grow the economy. She's like, that's it. That's that's what we're studying. You know, and, and so you have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of the game? And, you know, maybe preserving air could be possible, you know, in my eyes, it's preserving life, right? So, you know, being in an upward spiral, spiral, right? So then you wouldn't want to design a game where preservation of life and preservation of happiness are the game. And that's what you're measuring, not how many transactions or what the transactions are worth, or you're just measuring our people getting happier or people feeling more enriched is the food getting to people who are hungry, like very simple. Like one of the simple metrics that when I first started thinking about that as this first simple metric, I said, is what if we measured our societies by food on table and distance travel? So how many people had an empty plate in my town region block? And how far did that food travel? Really, really simple proxies for we're keeping people alive and, you know, promoting local business, as well as reducing the environmental impact of what we eat because it didn't travel as far, right? And so, yeah, like, what would the games look like? And what are you trying to optimize for? Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, what I was just going to say is, regardless of what game we may invent in the future, we all know where the current game has led us. Yeah, it's funny, because we talk about democracy, capitalism and money and all these things. And we have a particular model of them now that has led us kind of where you're pointing to it. And they don't all need to work that way. There are many different interpretations of democracy, capitalism has many flavors. I'll post in the chat my collection of variants of capitalism, which is like quite astonishing, and so forth. And then I wanted to point out and I'll post also in the chat, I did a short video a couple years ago about why our economics and ecology seen as such opposites, they both come from the same root word, Oikos, which is the household, and they both mean the management of the household. So my amateur theory is, they're talking about a different sized household. In economics, it's me and mine in our nuclear household in a zero sum fight against everybody else to try to figure out how to live. And in ecology, it's the pale blue marble. And basically, it's a fragile planet, we've got to learn to live together. And so ecologists are trying to figure out how to maintain that household. And what you do to maintain the big one is extremely different from what you do to maintain the little one, except a bunch of economists have created a series of fictions like the invisible hand, and a whole series of other things that that like, if only there was a market for everything, everything would work really well. And it would balance out on the large scale. And it turns out that those theories mostly fail, unless somebody can prove to me that they work really well, I've become convinced that those theories were basically hot air blown to inflate a way of seeing ourselves and our dependence on money and all those things to make to perpetuate this whole system, to make sure this whole system stays afloat. And this whole system doesn't need to work the way the system works. And over time, people try to hack the system through things called taxes, except we don't have a tax right now that is like the earth tax that says, Hey, if you're doing some behavior that's bad for the earth or for humans on the earth in the long run, we're just going to apply a tax to it and try to dissuade you from doing that thing. Can't convince a soul to do a tax like that. There's a gas guzzle tax, which is a little slice of this is a few little maybe pieces of this, but but a general like taxing is a mechanism for doing this. Taxing, as we said in the chat earlier, is also a big reason for money in the first place. Centralizing how everybody pays was really good for kings and rulers and despots. Anyway, long, long series of digressions. Doug, did you want to? Can I do a footnote here? Please. On economy and ecology, no most means man made law and logos means natural law. So one is the structures that are embedded in nature and the other is the structures we create. The problem. Yeah, and I was going to say the problem with it with the tax aspect is that if you have enough quote money in the current system, you can do anything you fucking want. You know, an example would be the luxury tax in the in the NBA for, you know, in terms of what your payroll is. Let's go back to Gil Forrest, Mike John. Gil, you're on in and I think you've frozen you've been having trouble with your connection. So why don't we wait for you to come back in the meantime for us? Oh, good. Perfect. Go ahead, Gil, we kind of hear you. Yeah, sorry, it's been cut cutting it out. Hopefully this works. Good. It sounds like you're being beaten up by aliens, but otherwise we're working here. So go ahead, it's often feel like that. Oh, well, it's the time. It's the times, you know, yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm great. Thank you for kicking this off. I'm both appreciates I think real not distinguishing between the nature of money and the uses of money. And as Stuart pointed out earlier on, money's to use very differently in different societies and different economic regimes. It could be helpful if we can, it's hard. But it'd be helpful if we can distinguish between those. I think of money as a tool to say distinguishing between what it is and how it's used in different societies and grace every like what you added just recently about the purpose of the economy, the economy, the game that we're in, what is what is money used for against what rules, what norms, what expectations, what desired outcomes. For me, going back to your original list on the slide, the ones that stand out for me are trust, coordination and allocation as focusing more on the nature of the of the tool itself. And the trust thing is a really challenging one because what Jerry said about, you know, money as released as a replacement for relationship, probably as necessary, once you get into larger groupings of people, then families and tribes, where this is durable personal relationship and a history that you can count on. But if I go across the ocean and meet somebody in another city, I need some other representations of trust. Now some of that's going to be introductions or kinship. And some of it's going to be this fact that carries something in it by by agreement, among all of us, I mean, it's money's not just a carrier of trust, but it only exists because of trust in the currency. And I'll point to the work of Flores on this on money and language actions like promises that are carried by money. We talked about the store of value assertion. And I think a bit more is not a store of value, but as a store as an interpretation of value, or a marker of the interpretation of value. And the whole business about externalities and and pricing and true pricing of things is not a feature of money. It's a feature of the economic system policy system tax system, allocation of externalities by policy, or by cultural assertion. I mean, when when when your daughter goes to Yelp to find a better taco place than Taco Bell, that's not something that can be represented in money, but it's represented in the social network that says to her, I'm putting my money there, not here. There's a conversation in the thread in the chat that couldn't follow about sunlight and money can that you initiated. And I don't know how I, I couldn't follow it after a while. But I would say that money is not like sunlight, because it's not abstract. Well, there are photons that strike chemistry in tissues of plant cells. There are molecules that dock or don't dock with other molecules, money is always extracted and interpreted in a reference representation of that. So I'm not sure that metaphor is apt. And and last but not least, Grace, you said something at the end about the public when you're talking about the game about focus on preserving life. For me, preserving life is too small an aspiration. I'd like to serve life and and grow life. And I've been lately thinking a lot more about what what might things be like, if we acted as though we belong to the living world. And so finally, back to the game, I think the value of distinguishing between what money is between maybe can't answer, and how money is used takes us right to how do we want it to use in relation to the game we want to be playing for the values that we care about. And that starts to become the design template for what do we need to invent that is that that is a better, you know, quote unquote, money that serves the game that we're trying to play. I'll stop there. Thank you. I do want to comment on that issue of trust and scalability, because I do think that that is it really connects to also what I think Mike said about we could invent anything we want, you could carry around a wallet with your trust references, just like you look at LinkedIn profiles or the rating on Yelp. Right. It is possible to scale it now, and it wasn't possible necessarily before. And so and you can think about that college degrees, like which university did you go to what your grade. So I do think that trust does scale, but we do also have to look at values, right. So if I look at a university degree, it might be something like there are Harvard, oh, I guess Peter said that sorry, not like, you know, they're Harvard graduate, that means that they're went to a top university or you could say that means they're a snob. So that particular label means something different to different people. And that's totally fine. Thanks, Grace. Forrest, I have you in the column. Gil, go ahead. One more thing. Yes, please. Just real quick. Earlier on. And I'm, and you didn't guess when that was. And I'm kind of surprised this conversation hasn't included Michael Hudson and David, obviously interesting things to say about that stuff. Thanks, you broke up a little bit in there. So we didn't get everything you said. But we'll get back in the chat. Thanks. Forrest, glad to have you on the call. Please jump in. Sure. You know, thank you for the discussion. I find it really interesting and particularly, you know, Gil, some of the last statements that you made about, you know, what is it that we would want money to serve? And how do we design for that? I go back and start thinking about what is nature's equivalent of money? And does nature have an equivalent of money? And so when I think about it, I because I don't know a whole lot about the study of biology or of those kinds of systems. But the area that I've studied the most actually is in the microbial world. And in the microbial world below the surface, we find there's a very active communication system going on. Those communication systems are facilitated by chemicals. And essentially, we've got if we think of it from a plant point of view, the plant turns around and says, Hey, at this stage of my life, I need these particular nutrients. And so it sends out a chemical signal through around the roots and says, Hey, do I have any of these nutrients right next to me? And I go, Oh, there isn't any here. But the fungi is listening. And so the fungi says, Oh, well, oh, you need it. It's not here. Oh, wow, way out there. Long ways away. There's some of it. I found some. And they bring it back and deliver it to the plant. And then I think about in terms of cooperation versus competition, and what we've learned in terms of even trees and the communication and that they will choose to share their nutrients for their offspring trees in the area to the detriment of themselves and such. So we see a lot of mechanisms that are happening in nature. And I wonder, in terms of particularly with tokenization, if we're not moving into an area where we might be able to replicate this, because if I think about that from the nature point of view, basically the plant is putting out a request. It says, I need this. And then the environment and that in which it's operating in says, Oh, can I deliver it to you? And boom. And in other situations, it may say, Well, you know, I don't need this for survival, but my offspring or my other relatives or things that are nearby need it in order to grow at the level they have. So I'm going to share it and things like this. So tokens, I think gives the opportunity for a similar thing to happen with a what we're doing is we're accounting for exchange, essentially, because there is an exchange of energy that's happening. And that's happening all over. And so without money right now, without some kind of method, we don't have a way to really acknowledge that symbiosis or exchange of energy. The other thing that comes to mind that's not exactly the same as this, but it comes into value and things like this. And I found Peter Diamantus's book on abundance. One of the pieces that he pointed out is the distinction between really something of very high value sometimes and something of very low value really has to do with access. So if we just think about communications and what we're doing today and having the video and everything 15 years ago or 20 years, whatever that timeframe was, this would be ridiculously expensive, but possible, but ridiculously expensive. And here now we have no marginal cost to be able to be participating in the way we have. So I see a world where we're moving in that way just like communication costs have dropped down so that it's negligible for most of us, not everybody on the planet, but we're working hard to spread that. But we're also seeing that we're going to be heading in the direction of that for energy and how that's going to transform things. And then I also believe and know of the technologies where that's going to happen for water. So all of these things, but if the same token we're still exchanging value, there's still symbiosis that needs to happen within nature. So that's what I wanted to add to that. Thanks, Forrest. I just want to drop two things in the conversation and then go to Mike and John. Grace, I'm just watching to see if you want to jump in. One is there's a really nice sort of background thread here of, hey, if only we could get money working closer to nature, how nature works. And one of my amateur theories is that the way we implemented money runs really counter to nature. Our money allows us to destroy nature all over the place all the time and it really sucks. And then we do a bunch of other things to try to patch it up and look where it's gotten us. But then my other amateur theory is that long time ago we understood how to live in community on the commons and that meant we had been extremely observant of nature and then we tweak nature, we bumped it, we fixed it, we helped it, we managed the landscapes without owning plots of land. We managed the landscapes together to turn them into fertile places to live. And when the first fleet shows up in Australia, they discover a ring around Australia that has spin effects and kangaroos and forests and stuff. And they're like astonished that they can reach in and grab an apple and a gourd and they're like, they think that's how nature happens to be in Australia. It turns out that for some 30 to 60 thousand years Aborigines had figured out how to make the land really abundant in Australia, which ain't that hospitable a place. And then they let sheep graze on the whole place and the sheep eat the manufactured landscape, the crafted landscape, the sheep eat it. It's like there's a bunch of crazy layers here. But I think one of the reasons why it's interesting to reach into indigenous ways of knowing is that they're closer to nature and they understand the value and values of what's happening better. And there's this giant gap between Western conceptions of money banking finance and value and pricing and markets and this other notion of how things work. So that was longer than I than I intended. But but I think there's a really, really interesting stream there that we could dip into some. And then the second thing is a friend of a few of ours, Pete Kaminsky knows Andy Mafay from a thing we've attended together in Woods Hole. But he's been busy reinventing bookkeeping for years. He's not a programmer. So there isn't a platform available. But he and he's he's gotten this from a kind of a strange genius who's trying to invent a form of bookkeeping that will take all the three or four kinds of books that any company maintains, like there's a materials set of books that people have for work and process and inventory. There's a there's another one for taxes. There's no one another one for for everything else, how to integrate those so that when an exchange happens, the energy expenditure, the cost of the earth, other kinds of things. And here I'm probably projecting onto Andy's work, but that those things are all taken into account in this different accounting system. And it's conceptually, it's really lovely. Because if we had something like that, we could actually have a sort of a frame of reference for beginning to measure and tweak these different kinds of things. And basically, I really liked the, you know, I really liked that discussion of nature and ways in which money can mimic nature of these ideas can mimic nature. There's one way in which money is very starkly different from nature, which is this idea of storage. No, in nature, you don't have storage, you have immediately use of things. And the idea that you could store something for the next generation, it's in permaculture that's considered a kind of waste. Nature does nature does some temporary storage like fruit and potatoes like potatoes, those are all a store of energy, right? In a transportable way, that'll help you reproduce because something will come along and eat it and poop it somewhere else and then you're on your way. Wouldn't it be good if all this depended on poop for our cycle? Yeah, I would add that actually nature has a whole variety of measures of storage and I go back to the microbial world, because really minerals in many ways are a storage medium for nature at the bottom level. And those minerals are basically unavailable to those who would use it, the plants and things like this without the microbial interfaces that actually consume those minerals and transform those minerals into something that's chelated or a way that the plants can consume it. So we do have long term storage, it's just not what we think about. And you know, that brings up and I don't even know how to bring it in, but it brings up this understandings that we're starting to have as humanity about the distinction between Newtonian physics and quantum physics. Because in Newtonian physics, we really think that we can understand all the specific elements and then we're going to turn around and understand the whole quantum physics says no, everything is actually really from your point of perception that things are moving around in frequency and waves and things of this nature. But as soon as you look at it, it turns into a point or at least that's one aspect of looking at quantum physics to this. How that applies to money, I'm not quite sure, except to know that it's the fundamental nature of what everything is, is energy and how does that come in and how do we make that practical and useful? Thanks, Forrest. And Stacy is asking in the chat the difference between storage and hordage, which is a nice question. Mike, John class, we have a whole bunch of people with hands up. So let's go, Mike, John class. So I'm a physicist and I spend 30 years doing policy. So I've got a couple questions about policy and how we would actually get to a different world. When you look at money, it's it's really such a small store of value compared to the overall economy. You know, we have M zero, M one, M two, at least the numbers I see it's like, you know, two trillion dollars are actually in something that looks like currency and coins and about 40 trillion dollars are entries in checkbooks. And when you look at the amount of debt we have, it's now over 300, almost 300 trillion because of COVID, there's been this very big spike we've seen over the last five years about a 25 percent increase. But the overall global economy all the assets is like 1,300 trillion and so money is like one out of a thousand. So my question is, is that stable? You know, does it does it, you know, is there a need to have more money, more ways to represent hard value? And then the second question is putting on my scenario hat and my my policy hat. How could we ever change the system we have? There's so many banks and institutions that are so wedded to the system and the regulators are part of this. I mean, they like the system because it gives them a job to do. Is there some radical scenario that could force us to face up to reality? And I guess I have two scenarios that could actually lead to 80 or 90 percent of the population saying, this is broken, let's fix it. One of them is clearly some huge debt crisis where, you know, suddenly out of this three hundred trillion dollars of debt, a third of it just kind of disappears. I mean, we clearly cannot service that debt. And people start asking, where's my real value? The second one's more interesting, and that is people suddenly wake up to the fact that all this money that's not cash, all their credit card transactions are being tracked at such a pervasive level that that that really there's no privacy left. Everything you do is now known by, you know, a few big companies and they're abusing that information. We always focus on social media and Twitter and Facebook, but the credit card companies and the brokers have no every aspect of our life. And if there was a flip, if there was some some major incident that woke everybody up, there might be a push towards some kind of privacy enhancing digital money or some new credit card that promises not to track you. So those are my two scenarios. Are they feasible and do you have another scenario or does anybody else on the call have a scenario that could push us to break through all of the structure that's been built up, including the regulatory structure that's doing a damn good job of of stopping a lot of the new alternatives. I'll jump in real quick and then pass it to Grace and then Parmjit real quick. I'm surprised we've gotten this far without mentioning crypto. And I was in a conversation yesterday about how the world seems to be shearing in two different directions. And a bunch of people are saying the normal system, meaning money and all that is completely fucked up. Thank you very much. Bye bye. I'm going on this other on this other avenue and crypto is its own really complicated conversation about value and values and all that kind of stuff which we've barely opened. But for me, I thought, Mike, one of your two scenarios was for sure going to be cryptocurrencies and that that economy that seems to be trying to detach itself from taxability, from traceability, from all those kinds of things. That's where the governments have to say, OK, I mean, right now they're allowing some experiments. But I think it would be really hard to clamp it down. They could push it underground. They could they can at this point, I don't know that governments can actually get rid of cryptocurrencies. They can make it very hard to move from the cryptocurrency into the cash economy. And they're doing that in a lot of places. Yeah. So but that but I think crypto could be the new enabler. But there has to be some forcing function so that as I say, 80 or 90 percent of Americans rise up and go, how are you going to fix this? So anyway, I haven't seen a good write up on this. I haven't seen people lay out, you know, the future of money scenarios and particularly the political drivers that could make them happen. But I welcome any any idea. That's a great question. So I do have a very quick answer to or at least to seed for your question there, Mike. Basically, there is the first upgrade to the Internet since Tim Berners-Lee close to 25 years ago is already being deployed. It's called HSTP and HSML. It's been approved by the IEEE. It's probably going to be released to the public in the fall. It solves all the problems of the current Internet, including privacy, hacking and faking, agnostic to all the new data sources that are coming in, including the AI. And so I think that basically what's happened is with the Internet, we've discovered what's it like to actually connect all together. Very much like nature is very connected together in one way or another. And now we're going to retrieve the power back to ourselves so that we're actually more self sovereign and have control of our data and things that nature. So without diving into that, I just wanted to seed it because that information is available, particularly if you Google IEEE and Spatial Web and Deloitte and that kind of stuff. So you can write a standard, but then you have to get it adopted. And I want to go back to Grace and Parmjit and I just want to ask Forrest if you put links in the chat to HSTP because it resolves to health systems transformation platform, which I'm quite sure is not what you mean. It is un-Googleable and I've never heard of it and I'm wondering if anybody else has, et cetera, et cetera. So Grace and Parmjit. So I don't think so. So I tend to concur with Jerry that there's a fragmentation for societies and people are going in all kinds of different directions and that we're going to see multiple parallel societies and that we're not going to see an overturn. I think it's I think we've pretty much I'm I'm convinced that there is no way in in in hell that the American people or any other people are going to rise up against horrible things that happen to them. For example, what if you told them to stay in their house for two years, you know, wear masks everywhere and close businesses and, you know, suffer untold death and destruction of business? Would they rise up? Well, apparently not. So I think there are going to be parallel societies and people won't care whether they move it to Seattle. I think the big shortcoming of the cryptocurrency industry is they don't have any land, farms, their own electricity or their own internet because you can just flip the switch and they are not in control of that. So that's problematic in that industry, but it is. There are people who live completely on crypto and never have to turn their money into fiat and that's totally fine with them and it'll be easier and easier in the same way that you see people traveling across borders when they're not allowed to with all kinds of tests that may or may not be real valid documentation. We're seeing right now these parallel universes emerge in terms of people apparently following rules, but not really following the rules and a kind of underground society emerging. And I think that's what's going to happen is that more and more people move over and just one tiny interesting thing in the Philippines. I think I mentioned this in one of our calls. People, you know, grocers are pricing some of their goods in SLP, which is the smooth love portion, which is the cryptocurrency of Axie Infinity, which is a game. So this in game currency is becoming the default currency and that is a country where there is a people's army and the people's army, by the way, gets there, they're paid better than the federal army, according to people on the grounds have told me so. Well, that's interesting. You've got an alternative currency, even if it's a game coin and alternative army. What else do you what else do you need really? So I think that may be what we see. Super, super interesting, Grace. Thank you. That was really interesting. Where was that grace about the money, the game currency? The Philippines, the Philippines. And of course, those are multiple islands, right? So you could imagine the government not even knowing that this industry is happening. Wonderful. The whole parallel economy could be almost completely invisible to the government. Yeah, cool. That's really cool. So I'm kind of always the activist element in in most circles. So let me see. I'm not really sure which bits to when address. First of all, I wouldn't trust crypto as far as I could throw crypto. Anything basically that standardizes a whole set of values in any way is going to turn out to be extractive. The only crypto I would maybe. Entertain is something like Holochain, which is a group of people who are driven by a set of values, which is to do with transforming how our how we interact and how we learn and what kind of technology we're going to need. But those people are protected they have a protective membrane so that it's curated so that it's not going to go too far out of what the values are for. So nature doesn't have a standardized rule for anything. What nature flourishes on is diversity. And what I'm studying Ayurveda and one of the principles around natural healing is that you look at what the resources are around you and you use them to the best effect. I'm not against like in nature you do have seeds and all these other kind of things that ensure survival, but the most important thing is flexibility and adaptability and diversity. And the more we can. Introduce those into systems, the better you're going to survive. The second thing is that we need to unlearn lots of things that we've been learning as truth. And one of those things that we're discovering a lot of people here is that economics is is manmade. It's not working. You know, there's all these theories about the history and where it's going. But. This is something that's quite new because for generations we've been told, well, it's just is like that and it's got to carry on being like that. But when you actually start looking at other things as well, you realise the difference between this is this is a set of things that are following natural order. And this is a set of things that are manmade. And so I've discovered similarly with medicine like Ayurveda is a set of rules that are following natural order. Whereas alipacic medicine is following a fragmented version that is kind of manmade learning and a similar thing is happening with law. There is a set of stuff that is natural law and there's a set of stuff that is manmade law. And the more you study it, the more you realise that manmade stuff really. I don't swear, but it fucks things up. So a lot of what we need to do is unlearn, unlearn, unlearn, unlearn. And so there's a value in the whole activity of increasing the capacity for people to unlearn and to learn and to listen and to connect and respect and see lots of different points of view. So there's a whole shed load of all of that that needs to be done. And if we do that right, we ought to be able to come up with some kind of infrastructure that allows for diversity, that allows for the things that we need in order to be resilient because what we have got is shed loads of passion, shed loads of intellect, shed loads of passion as well and a desire to do the right thing. But we just haven't got the spaces and places where we can come together and really understand the difference between natural order and manmade order, for example, so that people can then recognise, well, that's going along the right lines. We haven't got there, but it's going in the right direction. And over here, all that crypto stuff is not going in the right direction. So I guess that will do for now. Thanks, Maramjit. Excuse me. We're nearing the end of our 90 minutes and we're not going to make it through everybody who has their hands up. And I'm going to go to you all. And I'd love to ask us to sort of fly up a little higher and look down on the conversation. We've just touched on a bunch of things. We're not going to solve everything, but we've put some really juicy things on the table. If anybody wants to offer kind of perspective on the conversation and on pads of inquiry or interesting threads that they see, that would be terrific. So let's go to John Klaus Doug and Gil. OK, yes. Well, if you may be feeling like I do that, wow, this is really a resourceful, thoughtful and experienced community. And I'm really glad to be part of it and to be able to benefit from it. And at the same time, the complexity and the force of the other side or the challenges that we're facing is quite sobering. And it diminishes many worthwhile experiments. I'm aware if you have any kind of a progressive, semi-progressive background, and you first hear about local currencies, you say, oh, well, that's kind of cool. I'd like to, oh, yeah. Local business, local. And then you look at the history and you see what happened to them and how they fold back into fiat and you say, OK, yeah, yeah. Didn't quite work. The idea of parallel tracks, well, Mike had these couple scenarios and they were pretty dramatic. Like everything breaks down and then people finally face up to how bad the challenge is and then adopt some new things could happen. I kind of actually hope it doesn't happen that way because when we have that big a breakdown, our vulnerability to all kinds of bad stuff and authoritarianism, et cetera, seems to go up in proportion to how deep the disruption is. And I agree with a lot of the criticisms of crypto. And so I like the idea of parallel communities for a lot of reasons. We need a lot of experiments. We need a lot more diversity of experiment and so that the data about what is working can rise up just like the way those plants were sending out signals into the mushrooms and the mushrooms are sending an answer back. We need that kind of diversity of information. I'll just say a quick thing about some crypto concepts. If you imagine a somewhat of a community currency that designed actually to run alongside fiat that has assets, that it's connected, the value of the currency is connected to assets. It's not intended to and will not appreciate. So it are not appreciated in the way in which most other cryptos and most other tokens are designed to. So it immediately dissuades people who are looking for an easy way to make a lot of money or and gets rid of the whole Ponzi scheme aspect of crypto. And it, you know, there's lots of different ways you can build in values that have been brought up and that are important. You could quote unquote pay volunteers in this crypto for doing good things, both from a community standpoint and from an environmental standpoint. And the thing about this crypto, it would have it would have a back conversion rate if you're really stuck. You could put it back into fiat, but it would be a bad way to do it. You know, you take a big loss if you did that. So it's really designed to get you to circulate. You know, you did a good thing and this particular crypto is designed to support things like that. And the best thing you could do is spend the crypto to do more of the kind of thing that you were given to do it. So those are just some some possible characteristics that would lead to an incremental growth environment which we gather a lot of data about what's working. How does this work? How does it not work? Again, you got to you got to violate some of the or change some of the assumptions and stereotypes that are associated with current crypto. You got to make it asset based not designed to appreciate really fast has convertibility, but it's a very restricted convertibility. You don't have to go as far as demarrage, you know, but you can do that if you need to, you know, there's a lot of things you can do that would let it run as a more robust version of a local currency and generate a lot of good experiments that might become part of a transition to the better world that is Charles Eisenstein says we all know is possible. Thank you. Thanks, John. The transition into the industrial economy we have today didn't involve a huge revolution. It was it was a revolution in how we how we are on earth, but it didn't involve the kinds of revolution that we're thinking about here. Those were prevented and stamped down because people were trying to prevent capitalism from happening for lots of good reasons. And they were they were basically stifled and stymied and stopped and they suffered hard in lots of different ways that are interesting to go into. But but that was a massive transition that we're busy trying to talk our way out of right now. So so let's go to Klaus Doug Gill and then we might have to wrap around there. Yeah, I just wanted to come back to this idea of transition then and a lot of comments Mike and John just did touch on it. And I think it deserves maybe a dedicated conversation because we we we understand the complexity of what is fear what are currencies? How do you define currencies? How do you what are you basing them on? But I think we're entering a pretty critical phase in in society where our currency could actually collapse and our value structures are already precarious. So where do we go from here? How do we? How do we protect from the base on up right at community level? Where do we start to to sort of circle the back and so to speak and protect ourselves at community level with an exchange system that allows the markets to continue to flourish because at the base money is being used to empower markets the exchange of goods and services. So so if the prevailing currency if the fiat currency is at risk or they actually collapse how do we protect ourselves? So that's that's and so my my thought has been like a community based currency and there is blockchain that allows that to happen pretty easily but I think it deserves a broader conversation. And I think Kevin Jones who had to drop off the call earlier and was in the queue would have added things about community currencies local exchange other sorts of things that are that are these sort of locally resilient ways of surviving together and maybe even doing better. I do need to drop off in a minute or two as well. And Grace, thank you for for pushing us into this into this great conversation and leading us off so well. This isn't the end of this topic for sure. We'll figure out sort of where to continue it. We have a different topic for two weeks from now, which is kind of our group process as a whole. And then the two weeks after that maybe we come back here or maybe something that this spawned. I'm not sure. I'm willing to hang out for a couple of minutes over not a lot, but thanks, Klaus. Yeah, and if people are really super excited, I actually am running a six week workshop that goes dive deep into these topics. At the end of this month I run it about once a year. So yeah, shameless, self-promotional though. Will you put a shameless self-promotional plug in the chat, please? I will put that in there and happy to lead on any of those topics here instead of doing it as a separate course. Awesome. That's great. It's a pleasure being here and I just love this group. So thank you. Thanks, Grace. Mr. Carmichael and then Mr. Friend and then we wrap. Well, I think at this conversation I've actually figured something out. What if it turns out that population and economy grow together relatively in tandem? Not a perfect mix, but oscillating together until the world is filled up with humans the way it is now at which point the correlation between economy and population breaks down and the growth model no longer works. That seems to me to explain a lot of where we are. That is we have two models of growth, economy and human population correlated until the world is full and then the system breaks down. And I don't know which cycle of history theory that might fit, but I think it sounds sort of familiar. There are many different cyclical theories of history from Condrati of waves to all kinds of other stuff. I've got a collection of them. I'll post in the link, but it's sort of like we're in a limited petriation every now and then we overrun our carrying capacity. Is that what you're saying? Yes, but it's two systems. Our economic carrying capacity. Two systems, not just one. It's the economy system and the human population system, both growing, both exponential collapse each other by filling up the world. Thanks, Gil in the chat is recommending Peter Zahan's work. Gil, you're going to have the last word in today's call. Gil in transit, come in please. Oh shoot. Yeah, there we go. Oh, perfect. Yes. Yes, we hear you. Three quick last words. Number one, this has been great. Let's do it again. And for those of us who do that sort of thing, it would be great if somebody could visually map this conversation. I think there's so much here. That would be great to kind of extract at that level. Second, our use of the nature metaphor throughout this conversation is kind of wiggly and we would do well to ground that maybe specific conversation about what do we mean by that? Most important, race. Hinted at it. I think it's really difficult to have a conversation about money without a conversation about power. And not just, you know, we talked about how money is used, but how it is used by whom, for whom, for the sake of what. That sounds great. You broke up a little bit, but I think we got this. It really needs to be in there for the bitcoin. The concentration of wealth in bitcoin far exceeds the concentration of wealth in the fiat economy. And the recent crash in bitcoin means that there's a bunch of people who made a shit ton of money on the drop. Because somebody was buying as the price was dropping from people who were selling. So things are not to say up here. Thanks, Gil. On the presumption, if you can hear anything I said, I'll stop there. We heard most of what you said. I think enough to cast a gist of it. Thank you. Thank you. Next week, we're on check in and happy to have feedback from this call as we check in. If any of this lingers in your heads and you have some great new ideas, please feed them in. This is good. I like where we went and how this all came out. If you feel like going to the Miro board and adding stuff, I've barely checked on it. I don't know if anybody actually went in there and harvested or put things in. I don't know if anybody actually went in there and harvested or put things in. I don't know if anybody actually went in there and harvested or put things in. I just shared a link to my brain. I've been taking notes during and I've got about 20 tabs to go back to and add to it. So that's one start. But thank you all. Sure, you froze, but it's a lovely. Oh, shoot. My net connection is unstable, darn it. I'm sure you said wonderful things. Yes. We can all make you probably create things you just said about me. We can all imagine. You weren't the only one, Jerry. I hate it when that happens. We're all struggling today. Lots of dropouts. All right. Thanks, everyone. Do you have one minute for a question? Go for it. Do you have any references or anything in your brain on data sovereignty and digital sovereignty? I can just look it up. I mean, I'm looking for people I need to talk to about that, particularly in Europe. It's one of those really distorted, terrible phrases that is causing all sorts of bad policy. Yeah. I've got some, but not a ton. Let me give you a link in the chat on digital sovereignty. And I think there's probably other things nearby, but cooperating systems, the ad-averse. Ad-averse. The ad-averse. Yeah, ATTA, Barad Nassari, making the invisible visible. I'll check that out. So there we go. And I'm also looking for Korean experts on open data, but I don't think you probably know that one, so. That one stops the band, I think. Okay. The brain doesn't have everything yet. It sounds like Forrest might also be a good person to talk to. He seems to have some pretty amazing resources. Yeah. Well, we're working with our Indian friends. They're doing some very creative things on open government data. And so are the Taiwanese, but I need to find a little bit more about what the Koreans are doing. If anybody has any ideas on people or papers, thanks. Sorry, that's a hijacking, but very useful. That's all right. Thank you. So we're here for it. Thanks for a great conversation. Bye-bye. All right. See you later. Bye.