 Welcome to a new and ancient story, a show dedicated to the transformation of self and society. We're moving from the story of separation to a new story of interbeing. We explore it all, technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education, because the changes that are gathering today will leave no aspect of our world untouched. For deeper engagement with these ideas, join our community at newandancientstory.net. Yeah, so here we are again, Charles Eisenstein for a new and ancient story, and my guest today is Chris Martinson, famous for the crash course and other things. And I'm not sure what we're going to talk about, but it's going to be interesting. Yeah, so welcome, you're here at the Martinson homestead. That's right. You know, and we've been working on this for a long time, and this is a part of the life of my life that I don't think people get to see a lot. You know, I'm writing about economics, and we're recording this, we're just hours away from the Fed's most important rate decision of the whole world's waiting, you know, and that's just all this fantasy stuff. And then this, this, what you're here seeing, this is my life. This is my reality side of the equation, you know, and yeah, which it's a bit reassuring to me because if somebody is radical and thinking on the edge and pushing the edge in some way, and then I go visit them and their life is totally orthodox in every other way, then I start to wonder, well, what good is it really going to do if it's not, you know, going to be incorporated into the rest of life, you know, because our society isn't wrong along just one axis. The whole thing has got to change, not just, not just, you know, economics or not just medicine or not just education. So at some point, I think this happens to a lot of people when you start questioning orthodoxy, then your whole life changes. So yeah, we have a, I guess, an unorthodox lifestyle here, but you know, we live in a suburban area, there's like, you know, everybody's on a couple acres and there's... Yeah, it's not like you have a free love commune here, you know, it's still like, you know, you got your house, you got your daughters and your community and your gardens and chickens and grape vines. Yes. Yeah. My favorites. I love the grape vines. They're like, those are my surrogate girls. Grape vines are the feminine to me. They just untamed, wild and amazingly abundant. Yeah. And it's just unbelievable. And I think one thing I was thinking, you know, since we are maybe going to talk about wealth or economics and who knows if we'll go there, but you know, there's a kind of wealth here, like to be able to walk out barefoot into the grass and pick your own grapes. That's a kind of wealth that I don't think any amount of money can substitute for. You know, you could have the most magnificent Park Avenue apartment and you wouldn't get that. You know, you could have a 70 foot yacht and that wouldn't give you that. And I think a lot of the pursuit of monetary wealth and a lot of the insecurity around that kind of reflects a deep insecurity and sense of not belonging in the world and not being nourished by the world, not being, having intimate connections with nature, with community. You know, you miss all that and then you're hungry for something and wealth kind of fills that void. But as we're seeing with the whole financial merry-go-round now, how much, you know, like sometimes I'll read Zero-Hedge or one of the insider financial websites and people are so paranoid and I guess anxious is the word for it. And these are the people with money. Most of them are in the top 1% or close to it. And it's just so obvious that it almost seems like wealth is causing them anxiety. It is. And it should be because for a lot of these people they've wrapped their identity up in it. And so that's their narrative. They're running around with this narrative that identifies themselves with their wealth and they know on some level that this is fantasy wealth because all you have to do is read any one of 100 books now on the subject that says money is printed out of thin air, which means it's an idea. An idea that one segment of society in a very small one gets to just literally make out of thin air. So it's like your whole identity depends on what the magician is going to do next, you know, and that's not something you know deep down you can't control that. But for a period of time, financial wealth and real wealth are the same thing. They are the same concept. But then there are all these other periods of history again, easy to find where humans behaved like humans decided to take the easy road out, print money out of thin air debase the coinage if we were in Roman times, print the physical currency on paper stock if we were in Weimar times, or today, the electronic equivalent, which is harder to track and feel. So it treats that little undercurrent of dread people. It's not like you can see the bank notes piling up in the street, right? You know, where do you get your clues from? And they're a little bit harder to track, and that's part of the the devious nature of our current monetary system. It's just one step too complex for the vast majority of people to follow. But for the people who can follow it, and I interact with these people all the time, people who are up to their eyeballs 30 years deep trading 24 hours a day in their hedge fund, you know, they're the most nervous people I know. They're the ones who are buying retreat compounds with bunkers and beans and all of that stuff, right? Because they can imagine a binary outcome. It's either works or it doesn't. And that gives them a lot of dread. But the other dread for all the people who are just sitting around wealth is this, their identity is wrapped up in it. So they have that narrative. And what happens if your money goes away? Well, then who are you? Am I a nice person? Do I have other marketable skills? Have I ever been vulnerable so people can find out who I truly am so I know how the world really reacts to me, not my shell, not my money, not my face that I put out there. And so this becomes I think the existential dread. There's a quote that goes way back that says, there are none so poor as those who only have money, right? And it's speaking to that same idea because your wealth becomes you. And if it goes away, you go away. And our money's fantasy, it's just, it literally, we saw it in 2008, we're going to see it again, there has to be a financial reckoning. We know this because the world has amassed over 200 trillion dollars of debt. And it could only do that if it had this one narrative running, which is the future is going to be bigger. So we can pay all that back plus all the new debt we're going to accumulate as we go there. The whole thing works as long as everything's expanding. And what do you do? You open the paper yesterday, what do you find out world wildlife foundations like, Oh, 70% of the world's fish are gone. Oh, wildfires are burning out of control all over the place. Oh, we're having a lot of difficulty. Our aquifers are disappearing. Oh, you know, just it's just one body blow after the other to the narrative of we can just keep doing this forever. Yeah. And part of that narrative is kind of this faith in technology that that whatever resource we deplete will come up with a technological substitute and market forces will actually stimulate the creation of that technological substitute because it'll be when the aquifers are all gone will be so much money in artificial water that some brilliant person will engineer a substitute for aquifers and for fish and for pollinators and for the air, you know, for the planet. And so part of the whole narrative is this Masters of the universe narrative, which is interesting that that, you know, Wall Street has been also associated with the phrase Masters of the universe. And I think that that like you're saying money is an idea. I like to call it a story. Sure. Because, you know, it goes along with all of these, all of these narratives and agreements that that people have to agree to the idea. And but it's also, and you were kind of referring to this to magic. So today, the by the time people listen to this, this will be past history. But so the the Federal Federal Reserve is going to decide if they're going to raise interest rates. And the way that they do that is basically through incantations. They're their words have this kind of magical power. They they proclaim something. And it's not like they have a gun to somebody's head and say, you know, you better start buying more securities on the open market. They simply proclaim it. And as if they had some voodoo power, people begin to do to act accordingly. And I got the sense in the 2008 crisis that the power of these incantations was wearing thin. You know, they that Ben Bernanke, you know, he would say, you know, prosperity is just around the corner. Maybe that was actually Hoover, but but you know, he would say that and it wouldn't work. You know, yeah, and we have there have been multiple bubbles running in and it's a it's a distinctions importance. A lot of people say, Oh, remember, the 2008, that was the housing crisis, as if that was a housing bubble that blew up. And that was the the proximate cause of everything. And the truth is that was a side bubble. The main bubble started in the late 1980s, when we got on this crazy idea that we could create debt in the United States at twice the rate our income was growing. And we did that for 45 years, faithfully for 45 years running in the data series, debt was compounding at 8% per year, which might not sound like a lot, but but we're using the magic rule of 72, we can ask this question, how long before something that's growing at eight years, 8% how long will that take before doubles in size? 8.6 years, right? Yeah, you know, it's just thing, right? So every eight years ish, right? So every eight years ish, our country said we need twice as much debt twice as much debt, twice as much debt, we did that reliably for 45 years, that's what broke in 2008. And the housing bubble was a side component of that of that phenomenon. Yeah. And so think that through every 8.6 years, we need things to double. Yeah, twice. And really, I even see the whole debt bubble as as a symptom of something deeper, which is the end of growth. The system doesn't work like you were actually saying this before. You know, if money is created through debt, then there is always more debt than there is money. So to prevent bankruptcies and deflation, you have to keep printing even more money, which comes along with even more debt to pay off the existing debt. And that has to go on forever. And that can only happen as long as the real economy is growing sustainably. If the real economy stops growing, then the debt grows faster than the ability to repay it. So that's why all the political elites and economic elites say, well, the solution is to stimulate growth again. If we could only return to the days of high growth, then everything would be fine. And they're right. If we could return to 1870s rates of growth, we could grow away out of the debt. But for one thing, the ecosystem can't sustain that. And there's other arguments too for the end of growth that basically talk about the saturation of demand. How much does a human being really need that is measurable in money? How many appliances? One time I asked, when I was teaching at a university somehow, I asked the class, how many TVs do you own? And it ranged from the lowest number was three in your family and your household. The highest was 11. Someone had 11 TVs in their house. And we have this idea that the more stuff we have, the wealthier we are, but how many refrigerators can you have? How many TVs, there's kind of a saturation. And then, well, what about services? Maybe we can grow services. But what is a service actually? It's the replacement of a relationship with a monetized relationship. So say your family member gets bit by a dog. In the old days, excuse me. In the old days, you'd have a lot of folk knowledge about how to take care of that bite. You'd have maybe the village grandmother next door who knew how to do it with herbs. And none of that would be paid for. And you'd be living in a house that you built yourself with the help of neighbors. And if your house burned down, then everybody would help rebuild it. So these have been converted into services called medicine, called homebuilding and called insurance. Insurance is basically a substitute for community helping each other out, taking care of each other. How many of these services, how many of these relationships can be converted into paid services until there's nothing left? I'm speaking at a coaching conference in a couple of weeks. And I'm going to ask that question too. Like, is this the monetization of friendship, of wise advice, something an uncle used to do, something a village elder used to do? And so we're so depleted, no more community and no more nature. And can we keep doing this? Do we want to keep doing this? Do we even want sustainable growth? What about some other kind of wealth? Well, think about this idea. So Adam Taggart and I have just written up another book and it's coming out in a month or so. And what we've done is we've been talking about all these different forms of wealth for a while. And then we came across this work by Ethan Rowland and Gregory Landau out of the permaculture side, called it the eight forms of capital that different eight forms. We said, Oh, this is a good organizing framework. And, you know, we had slightly different forms. But the idea that there's, you know, to make it that explicit that these are forms of capital, we've talked about it as wealth, but people seem to like this capital idea, particularly on... Makes you sound smarter, if you call that capital, right? But what you're talking about, there's this idea that when the local healer and the neighbors rebuild those things, that's what happened there was those threads of social connection got woven more deeply into strings and strings become ropes, right? And the thing about a financial transaction is once you exchange the money, it's over. It's done. No obligation remains. Yes. And that's both it's brilliance, it's cost effective, it's efficient. It's a lot of things. So those are things we elevate in our current narratives like, Oh, yeah, we want to sell more stuff to more people and as cheaply as possible. That's our mantra. And when we do that, we do it really well. But when you do sell stuff like childcare services, like entertainment, like the things that you talk about that we used to do for ourselves, when you do that transaction, when I sell out 300 bucks to go see a rock star, you know, that's it. I get that one experience and it's over. And so this idea then is that it's efficient, but what are we missing? And that's the part I feel like the conversation we never have like, Oh God, look how much better your smartphone is. Well, what did it take away by being so much better? Because it is better. What's missing on the other side of that, right? Maybe social interaction, maybe I'm losing the ability to exercise the parts of my brain, they can calculate eight into 72, maybe I'm losing whatever these pieces are, right? You know, so there's always something lost with the new thing gained. And I think elder cultures used to have a more careful process for saying, wait a minute, here's a new thing. That's fine. But what does it really mean? I was really enjoying last night, you had people over and it was a potluck and people were singing. And that's a good example. If the economy crashes, you can also sing together, you have that social capital, you won't be impoverished in the way that that someone would be who doesn't have access to, you know, people who can create fun together. It makes you more resilient. We were talking about, you know, this isn't a kind of wealth that is hard to get. You know, it's kind of readily available. And everybody's hungry for it. But we have social structures. And even kind of the infrastructure of suburbia keeps us separate from it. We were talking this morning before we were recording about how a totally different world is really, really close. You know, you were talking about this medical cannabis thing where people who are on, you know, on opioids, opiate drugs for years, terrible pain that just, you know, is getting worse and worse. And they're on more and more drugs. And then they take this herbal remedy and the pain's gone. It's a miracle. Oh, it's astonishing. And that's not going to contribute to GDP. There's no big research apparatus, clinical trials. I mean, you know, you couldn't patent it and sell it for $1,000 a pill for $100,000 for the course of treatment, like this company did that figured out how to cure hep C, right? Hepatitis C, terrible, it ruins your liver. And so they discover this drug and they're selling it to us here in America for $1,000 a pill, just about, and it will cost you $100,000 to get through. India's already like patented, you know, gone off patent on the whole thing and they're producing it for about $8 a pill, right? So here's this idea that a company, you know, and that's what we support, like, oh, Gilead Biosciences, good job, you discovered this life-saving remedy, but now they're going to gouge for as much as they think the market can possibly bear in a little further. The cannabinoids, there's no market like that because you can't patent it. It's a plant, it grows for free. You know, I'm sure Monsanto is working on figuring out how to create a strain that, you know, is theirs through the magic of GMO. But I first came across the cannabinoid story when I watched this TED talk by this guy who was one of the first pioneers and they're called CBDs, cannabinoids. And the CBDs were, had been known to have these properties and they'd really been investigating and they grew these astonishingly high CBD ratio plants. It looks like marijuana, but the ratio between THC, which is the psychoactive one that people smoke, the hippie smoke at the Grateful Dead parking lots to get high versus the CBD, they grow in strains that have so little THC you could smoke it all day long and never experience a buzz. So it's just a plant with no psychoactive properties, but it has these other things. And our bodies are loaded with cannabinoid receptors. We're still trying to figure out what they do. They're in our central nervous system. They're out in our peripheral nervous system. They're there. And he was talking about this case of a girl named Charlotte. And by the time he'd seen her first, she was five years old. She'd been born as a twin. Her twin was fine, but she had a certain type of epilepsy, one of the most severe forms. And by the time she was three, she was having upwards of 20 to 30 grand mal seizures a day. By the time she's four, she's got the little blue helmet, totally socially and intellectually retarded in development. And the doctors had basically gotten to the point where they said, there's nothing we can do. Her mother had already had to do Reviver through CPR twice. And they said, that's it. Just get ready. They had to do not resuscitate. The DNR was on this little girl for the next big episode in the hospital. And so that's where they're at. And they wrote through a wit's end and they said, what can we do? Maybe. And they'd heard about this cannabinoid oil. And so they went and they tried it. She gets a teaspoon in a syringe under her tongue. She swallows it. Two days later, she's down to one petite mal seizure. And that's how she's been ever since. And now she's caught back up and they have her in the audience. You get to see pictures like she's a dancing, smiling, totally cured little girl. She has to continue taking this medicine, right, which is an oil that comes from a plant. And it took cure. And here's the heartbreaking part. There are about 1100 other families with children in the same type of epilepsy, a rare form. And they are not allowed to have this substance shipped to them. So they've had to make the hard family decision. They have to move to Colorado where it's legal to produce and distribute this stuff because the federal government has decided that anything that says marijuana, even if it can't get you out, it's still a schedule one drug. And if they shipped this stuff across state lines, it would be they would be in federal prison. And that's so when you say, are there things right in front of us that we could change this story right there, right? And if we were a wise intelligent country, we would go, oh my gosh, not only is the CBD stuff great for epilepsy certain forms, but it shows huge pain management. It's got exceptional characteristics for certain types of cancers, like stops it in its tracks, like kills it kind of a thing. And if we were a wise country, we'd say, let's, let's put several billion US federal taxpayer dollars into this to really study it so we know the best doses for the right things, we can get this treatment out to people who need it, and we'll make that all free. That would be a I think a a useful wise response in what's happening. Eric Holder's Justice Department under Obama has been fighting this every step of the way, including rating these dispensaries and trying to shut it down and pretending as if the people voting for themselves that they want to have either recreational or medical marijuana in the state, pretending as if that was somehow a horrible thing for people to vote on something that went against the wishes of the federal government, because they have a DEA who has a budget that they would love to protect and taking a big bad marijuana out of their budget would be a horrible thing for thousands of bureaucrats. Yeah. It's hard to know what to say. Well, it's just an example, right? It's just one of those little, that's just a little story, but we could fragment that story a thousand times. Yeah, in every field, you know, you could, you could talk about the educational industrial complex, right, and come up with the same stories of, you know, kids who at enormous expense are being shunted through the, you know, school to prison pipeline and, and, you know, fed psychoactive drugs to help them to make them pay attention, you know, and kept in, you know, behind barbed wire. I mean, schools are a lot like prisons in a lot of ways. And what we could talk about agriculture, I mean, the same kind of chemical treadmill that happens to people pharmacologically also happens in agriculture, where you, you know, apply one herbicide and then that, you know, does something and you have to apply a second one and then an insecticide and then a fungicide, you know, and, and, and it's just this kind of addictive pattern where the solution to the problems caused by technology is even more technology. You know, I get drunk, I feel good the next morning, I feel shitty, my life starts to fall apart to make myself feel better, I get, I drink even more. That works again. And, and, you know, again, it's the same pattern as a technological fix and the debt crisis is the same. You know, how do you, how, how are these, how are we going to keep the system running a little longer? How are we going to pay, how are we going to enable the debtors to pay their, to make their payments while we can lend them even more? It's the same pattern. And I think that it fits in with the guiding ideology of civilization, which is a growth ideology and essentially because the ideology essentially says there is no limit to our ability to engineer ourselves out of whatever situation that we're in because, and there's kind of like the holy grail in physics is the theory of everything in technology. It's maybe nanotechnology, genetic engineering that it says that someday we'll have perfect understanding and perfect control over physical reality and social reality too. And, and using the, the methods that were developed in the 16th, 17th, 18th century, the scientific approach to solving problems. Using these methods, we will be able to engineer all problems out of existence. You know, what's, and it's a reductionistic ideology too. What's the cause of suffering? Well, you know, it's certain brain chemicals, it's brain chemistry. And so if we can have complete enough control over that, then we'll be able to eliminate suffering. You know, what's the cause of crime? What's the cause of poverty? If we can only gather enough data and exert enough force in the right places. And according to the right equations, and that's why it's called the social sciences. That's why economics pretends to be a science. It says you can reduce reality to something measurable, to something quantifiable. So economics, as it's known today, is purely the study of the quantifiable. Usually it's the study of money, but some economists try to expand it and use some other metrics. You know, so you hear about alternative metrics, but it's still about metrics. It's still part of the ideology that, that only what's measurable is real. And that's an ideology that goes back to Hume and Galileo even. And I think that the, the transition that we're in, and this involves money and economic thinking too, with the transition that we're in is toward, is back toward the unquantifiable, toward the qualitative, the things that actually make life rich. And so even with the, you know, cannabinoids, you're saying it differently, something like that. I've always said cannabinoids, but it's probably wrong. Even with that, like to make it into a drug, whether or not it's patentable, to make it into a drug, you have to extract. You have to extract the active ingredient. And the ideology says that there is an active ingredient, that its efficacy is based on a certain something inside of it, and not on the holistic interaction of all of its ingredients. But many people find with herbs that the raw herbs more effective. And the same thing when we're talking about permaculture too, like you were talking about these guys, I'd like to hear about that again, these guys out in California, they're getting incredible yields. But it's not because they've isolated the factors behind incredible yields and are, you know, that's called the chemical fertilizer. So we've done a podcast with Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm in Sebastopol, California. And then I had an opportunity to go for a farm tour. And I was like, I was pretty excited. Now I would actually drive hundreds of miles out of my way if I was anywhere near to go take one of their farm tours, because it was the seeing, it was the being in what they had created. They're incredibly intelligent. And they didn't start out saying, you know, we're going to demonstrate that permaculture works. They didn't even know the word. They were two ecologists. And they were saying, how can we grow in a way that's ecologically right? And so one example, they understood predator-prey relationships. If you understand how coyotes and rabbits come along, you understand that rabbits breed very quickly. They tend to get out of control. The coyotes breed much more slowly, but eventually they catch up. And there's this whole dynamic relationship predator-price. They said, well, insects are the same and insects are your problem in any farm. So what do we need to do? Well, simple things like interspersing rows of crops, but then they planted these hedge rows with very, very diverse species in them. You know, the ones I saw had these giant lavender and rosemary, all the things that can grow in their zoning awesomeness out there in California. And so they built these hedgerows every so often under the theory, the idea that your crops, when you take them down, you remove basically the substrate that insects live on, which so you would take your pests out, but you take the predators out as well. So the hedgerows are for the predators because they're longer living, they're slower reproducing, and they need a place to hang out. And so they created all these hedgerows. When I was there, I'm a gardener. I love gardening. I didn't see any pest pressure. Right? They had huge rows of brassicas, all different kinds, not one cabbage looper flying around, not one little moth eating thing. Like, do you have trouble with these little green worms in your broccoli? I mean, people hate that, right? And they're like, no, we don't have those. Like, how can you not have those? While I was standing there, I counted as one of the things I do, over 30 species of birds in the local area. They have these catchment ponds that they've tested fully for nitrogen. They have no nitrogen runoff. Their soil just won't let it out. And I saw nightherons, a kill deer, what I consider to be very sensitive apex species that I honestly, I haven't seen in a while. And they had them all, right? And I'm just watching this go on. And it was just nature. It looked a little unruly, but these people measured everything. So here's one measurement. They're getting $100,000 per acre in gross revenue off of their farm. The average organic farm in the region gets $14,000 an acre. They get seven crops a year because they can grow right through the winter. And they said, oh, by the way, we have a crappy microclimate here. We are eight degrees colder than the average farm around here because of this little nestle that we're in. So they have a harsher January, February, but like our plants are so healthy, they can weather even a pretty good knit. And so they're growing all year round. And they said, but here's how this plays out. We're not like a normal CSA where we have to sign people up every June. And then we lose them every October because we're out of stuff. We have, we keep our CSA member supply all year around. So we don't have to go through that regular boom, bust thing. We're selling tomatoes in May. Nobody else's. So we're out there at $5.56 a pound. By the time everybody's hitting the markets with tomatoes in August, we're not. We're onto some other crops that nobody else, you know? So they've just, they've been smart about every way that they've stacked and layered when and how they produce in the relationship they're in. And the real measure is, and they said, everything's about your soil health. That's the one thing they optimized for is soil health. And so when they harvest now, and this was, this changed how I've been gardening for 30 years, they just come through like, let's say you've got Roe Broccoli, they clip them at the base with clippers and they leave the roots in the soil. Because they said, as soon as you disturb the soil, there's a three to four month recovery process for it every time. So when we do that, we leave the roots in. And by the way, the roots are full of tasty stuff. Bacteria live on them. And they've just put compost right on top of it after they've clipped. And there are plants in the ground within three hours from the starts that they have. So they're just like, never disturbing the soil. And there's always crop cover. And that's it. That's their magic. I wrote an article about, I mean, because another thing that's happening when you're doing that is your sequestering carbon in the soil. So for one thing, this is coming from, it's not just, this is very different than kind of an intensification of the engineering mindset. Because you're no longer seeking, you're no longer seeing the soil as a resource from which you're trying to extract something. But you're actually, I phrase it in terms of gift, you're in a mutual gift relationship to the soil, and you're saying, how can I, like you said it, how can we enhance the health of the soil? Because we know that if the soil is healthy, we're going to be healthy too, in every way, you know, physically, financially, whatever. And that mindset, if you generalize it, it says, my health, my well-being depends on your well-being, which is the opposite, the opposite from classical economic thinking, which puts us all into competition with each other, and says that we are all driven to maximize rational self-interest defined as the interest of the separate self. So in a competitive economy, in fact, especially in an interest-bearing debt-based economy, your well-being is not my well-being, because we're all in competition with each other for not enough money to pay the debts that create the money. So I see the transition to permaculture to where I would even say regenerative agriculture, because we're serving the health of the story. It's part of a larger trend of the soil. It's part of a larger transition in our economic thinking too, in our political thinking too, that says the same thing, you know, how do I make the soil of society healthier? How do I contribute to the well-being of the people in my community, my social and my ecological community, because I know that if I do that, I'll be healthier too, I'll be better off too, because we're fundamentally not separate from the soil. We're not separate from each other. That's a big shift. And the alternative, you know, I wrote an article comparing regenerative agriculture that sequesters carbon with geoengineering, which is an intensification of the same thing. It's reductionistic. The problem, too much carbon. The solution, well, you remove the carbon. The problem, you know, too many, you know, whatever moths, you know, too many moths. The solution, you kill the moths. The problem, not enough phosphates in the soil of the solution, you add some, you know, it's reductionistic. And as I was saying before, more of the same just gets you more of the same. And so this is, it's not just a shift in strategy, but it's coming from a different conception of ourselves in relation to the world that's no longer separate. And when we move to that, the problems that were impossible to solve before become easy. They disappear. Just like the medical cannabis can cure conditions that required enormously expensive chemical management that wasn't even as effective before. Yeah. And so with the reductionist approach, we're usually treating symptoms. And sometimes you can treat a symptom all day long, right? And not ever do anything except find yourself in a loop of treating that symptom over and over and over again. So I think what we're really talking about here is that what needs to happen is the swing back towards relational. So if we were isolationist and reductionist, relational is the answer. And so these people, it's saying frogs farm are in relationship with their soil, right? It's a, it's a, and that relationship will be complex. There will be the year you got 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. There'll be the year it didn't rain. And there'll be different things. And if you're intelligent, you just understand the aspect of that, right? Like in my garden, I'm in relationship with my plants. I can look at plants and tell you whether it's stressed or not. It takes me some time to figure out why it's stressed. Is it too little nitrogen? Is it too much water? Is it fungus? I don't know. But they tell you really clip quickly when they're stressed. And, and then the answer is usually to figure out what that thing is that's stressing them. And then water is the only thing I know that's, that's, that's, you know, a one and done fix. If they're stressed for water, you fix that with water, right? But everything else requires a thought process, you know? And so I want to get back to this point, though, this idea that we have all of these things that are, that our solutions might be too strong word, but we have intelligent responses to pretty much everything that's vexing us at this point, right? That we could do, but we would have to decide that's what we want to do. And the great news is we could all wake up tomorrow and do those things as a culture. But there are a lot of people who are wholly addicted to business as usual, you know? And it's astonishing to me to see like just how cartoonish we are as cultures. So I'm looking at this refugee crisis in Europe. And it's this cartoonish that the media are saying, oh, here's another boatload of Syrians, and they're clearly Somalians, right? They're not even the right color, right? To be Syrians. So there's, they're getting this whole migration and refugee pattern coming out of places that NATO bombed, and that are otherwise being depleted of the resources they need through climate change through other things in over population. It's like, you try to make what's happening is that the economic system makes it, makes these places unlivable. So we make it unlivable. And then when people don't want to live there, we try to keep them out. And the symptom, of course, is the immigration. But what if we address the cause, which is that they're being made unlivable, and stop doing that? Like, do people actually want to leave their ancestral homelands behind and go on this dangerous journey into the unknown? Is it because they're, you know, want to come and get us? Or like, that question is never asked. I've been been looking at the news. No one's asking that. And it's the economic system. It's the debt. It's again, like the, the, you know, they're there. Well, and here's the thing. So, you know, here's my prediction. Europe, are you listening? Here it is. The 500,000 that you're struggling with is not even the tip of the iceberg. I bet you there's 100 million people who would who are going to get ready to migrate in the next two decades, right, for reasons like desertification, aquifer depletion, final soil erosion, crustification, you know, a thousand year rebuild process, whatever the story is, that the larger systems are broken. And so we have this warfare extractive system that just keeps applying its muscle and might, you know, the IMF will continue to loan bad loans into, to allow people to advance that certification faster, convincing themselves they're doing God's work and doing good work, right? You know, they're, they're, let's help them build dams. Although they're actually, they're actually use a lot of, in some of the, some of the best regenerative agricultural practices are being developed now on the Sahel. So there is, you know, the, the new world is actually gaining momentum. It is. And those efforts are wonderful. Those aren't the ones being pushed by the big banking systems. No, no, no, those are happening to supply. Because you can't get a financial return from those. Right. In fact, you know, those, when you reenter a relationship, like you're talking about, then you're actually reducing economic growth. You know, when you get together with your neighbors and sing songs together, instead of going to a concert or a theater, then that's, you know, a few thousand dollars in services that are no longer in the economy. When you make your own grape juice, you know, and your own herbal medicines and your own fermentations or whatever the things you do and share it with neighbors, that's one less thing that people buy it. And it's one less business opportunity to that a bank can lend into and generate new money. And it's, you know, one less job from somebody for somebody somewhere, like you're actually, and so no wonder the banks don't support. I mean, you look at sustainable development in quotes here. And the only things that get let in to the paradigm are the ones that are going to somehow generate foreign exchange. They're going to generate some kinds of goods and services. Otherwise, it doesn't fit into our financial system. Right, right. Here's a quick side point. I get asked this a lot. Chris, what do you think about socially responsible investing? This sounds so good. It sounds so heartwarming. And many of the stories are heartwarming. But what's happening with socially responsible investing is they're still trying to get an 8% per year return. They're trying to at least meet or hopefully exceed the S&P, which means they themselves are still wedded to the growth paradigm. Whether socially responsible or not, I think of that as like fluffing the pillows on the bus that's headed over the cliff. We feel better about it. It's more comfortable ride. But if you're still saying what we need is a return that can accrete passively to people who just have air quotes here, capital, right, financial capital, that model is still predicated on this idea that the world will always be able to give us more of stuff that we can extract. And that's where we are in the story to me is we're at that uncomfortable part where the engineers are looking at like, I don't know if the Saturn V rocket's going to clear the launch pad anymore, right? The thrust is going as hard as it can, but it's not really gaining like it should. And they're worried the nose is about to tip over. And it's an awkward moment, right? That's the pit in the stomach people have. We're like, all engineers watching the Saturn V rocket go, I don't know. And the hard part for me is, you know, I too sometimes get to speak at colleges. And I was at Berkeley a few weeks back and there's usually the usual stunned, I'm giving a dose of reality to the students, but I always get this one or two of them come up and go, I want to work with you. You're talking about real stuff. My college is still filling me full of crap. I'm paraphrasing. But that's the thing. It's like there's this new reality that younger people can just detect. You know, they can feel it that the narrative is wrong. And so when somebody comes along and says, Hey, the narrative is wrong. Here's, here's why it just has that ring of truth. So I feel like, you know, I was talking with this woman who was an elder in this art of mentoring community that everybody came back from. And she was big in the civil rights movement at the time was living in Alabama, this black woman. And she said, you know, for the longest time, I felt like, wow, I was just really, I was so important. And I helped really push something. And, you know, she said, I had all this, this ego about how I did something. And she said, now that I'm old enough, I realized that only happened because the time was right. And I was one of the people who was there when the time was right. It was ready for that to happen. And yes, I was a motive force within it. But I could have been even 10 times better than I was. And if the time was wrong, it wouldn't have happened. So there's a that I have that growing sense that the time is right. It's the your right. We are, we are in service to something much larger than ourselves that wants to be born. Yes, I was speaking to Julio Alaya, who's one of the founders of the coaching movement. He's been doing it for decades and decades. And he's he was saying when he 30 years ago, 20, 30 years ago, when he would ask people, okay, what are your goals? Or your organization's goals, your personal goals from this coaching relationship? And they would say, Well, I want to make more money. I want to be more successful. I want to be more effective. Today, he says no one is saying that no one they want to contribute more. They want to align with their passion. I heard John Perkins saying the same thing. You know, it goes to business schools and speaks and and people are no longer saying tell me how to make money. You know, it really is changing. And I think that at the beginning, you were talking about some of the wealthy people who are, you know, trying to set up their armed compound with their food supplies and stuff. You know, I would ask them, I would question that on two levels. One is, is that really what your heart wants to do as the world burns to hold out a little longer? You know, like there are people to help out there. And I know that there's something in you that wants to to take in refugees that wants to help your fellows. And the second thing is, it's not even going to work. Because we are all interconnected. And unless you are going to become a professional warlord, then this is a dead end. Because if things get really bad, people are going to come. Oh, you know, here's your fortress where you have gold and supplies and stuff, they're going to come with guns and they're going to take it. Unless you have bigger guns, like if you're not going to become a warlord, then by far the best security that you could have right now, the best investment you can make is to give it away, to be generous, to strengthen your community, to generate goodwill, to be somebody who has given so much over the years that people will take care of you too. And I'm finding sometimes I do also speak to people who are in SRI or impact investing. And I say, yeah, the paradigm is shifting. In the past, it was given the unchallenged parameter of an 8% return, how do I do the least harm and the most good. So the return came first, like you were saying. Now it's changing or wants to change, where you put the result first, and you let the return take care of itself and you let go. And it has to be a real letting go. And that's the principle of the gift. If I give you something, I'm not going to, if I'm calculating that I want to make you sign a contract that you're going to give me even more in return, or even if I'm psychologically manipulating you, then we can both sense it's not really a gift. But if it's a real gift, Lewis Hyde says it's like giving it, you give it around the corner, you give it into the mystery. That is the new, and that fits into the regenerative agriculture paradigm too. You give to the soil and you trust that if the soil is healthy, I'll be healthy. You trust that if I give into the mystery, if I make a sacrifice, I mean religious texts, talk about this, if I make a sacrifice, a sacred gift, that's what a sacrifice is. If I do that, then I know I will be okay because I'm not separate fundamentally from that which I'm giving to. And that's why I even thought of starting a radical investment newsletter that's about this, about the gift, you know, totally turning it on its head. Yeah. It's such an important concept buried in there and there was one I got a transmission on every so often, like I'm aware of these moments now where somebody says something and all of a sudden I'm changed. And I was at one of these art of mentoring things last year and they had this Native American, very interesting guy, just super bubbly, bright, young, and he had resisted the call of his culture for a long time. You know, did the whole like went fully urban, what was in that world was slowly, it wasn't working for him, kind of hit bottom and he got drawn back into his old culture. And so he really picked up a lot of it. And he'd held this sort of shamanistic space during the whole time. And but really lightly, he was just cracking jokes the whole time. And then he said, Oh, I have a few things to give away. And there were all these people he wanted to honor people who had just done something that he'd caught as I just brought a bunch of stuff with him, you know, he didn't know on bringing this for you. He said, I don't know, I just assemble things that are important to me. And then if it's right, I give it. Right. And so he gave away some really important stuff. He's like, Oh, I didn't plan to give this away, but this is the only necklace I have for my grandmother. And here it is. And I'm honoring you at this moment for doing that. And, and it was really heavy, you know. And so after he'd given everything away, he broke the tension. He said, Oh, by the way, I will not even remotely be offended if I see that necklace at a tag sale next week. And I'm not kidding. He's like, it's yours. I don't know what happens to it next. I have like the fact that it was important to me, in my culture, the minute I give that away, that's gone. It's now yours. And you do something with it. Right. And it was just, that was a transmission to me because in my culture, I think giving comes with strings. Right. You know, it has a little thread to me. And I like that idea of that when you give, that's what that's that that moment is that's what happened. Boom. You give into that mystery. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be, I mean, that's kind of a pure example. Like realistically, there might be expectations and things, but as long as there's at least some element of letting go, then it's a gift, you know, like, like, for example, I'm staying at your house now. And it probably means that if you come through Asheville, that, you know, you'll stay at my house. So there is kind of an expectation, but you're not doing it so that that will happen. But it is creating kind of a social tie between us. Right, it does, but it but the ties on this other level, it's not about the thing anymore. Yeah. You know, because when you give the thing away, man, it's gone, right? But there's other, the other aspects of this can certainly be resident, right? Yeah. And yeah, I'm sure that, you know, if you found yourself in a situation where one person was just taking, taking, taking, taking, taking, that would over time, that would just that would impact all things. It's about, you know, the more I, the more I, the older I get, the more I realize that life is about flows, right? And I feel like a lot of our culture, particularly around masculine, feminine, male and female, we bottle up stuff, you know, we've asked men to bottle up their emotions. We've asked women not to be women, but to be more like men. That's what we honor. Hillary Clinton, what a woman, you know, like, even in movies, you know, like, we get these kick ass women now, you know, in, I can't remember that one, where they keep living the same day over and over. It's not Groundhog Day. There was a more recent one, we're fighting the aliens, you know, and there's like this kick ass woman who doesn't show emotion, you know, and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and the flows that are built into us are, are, are bottled up. And it makes us unhealthy in a lot of ways. And so, you know, that whole idea of giving is important, but so is receiving. You know, for me, that's hard. That's something I wrote about in this book is, is really that for me, giving is easy, way easier, because I'm, I'm burdened with my sense of in debt, like I don't like to receive because it makes it look like I need help, which maybe exposes me as weak and, you know, I don't like that vulnerability and giving's like, And then you also owe something too. And I owe something to the person or to the universe because you've received so much. Right. So, so, but in the, in this concept of flow, what is giving? If nobody's there to receive, right? And so the act of giving generously is one side of the equation. But if you want that social capital to really rev up, the other side has to be there. It's the person has to graciously receive, right? So I've learned a little this watching like my, my wife at Christmas, any present she gets, you can't detect like, was it really wanted or not? It's just they're all so graciously received, you know, and I just watch that, you know, and I said, Oh, that, that cloth, that makes the giver, that makes the whole thing just flow. It keeps the energy going. So for me, my battle is to learn how to receive, not even just receive that somebody gives me something, I'll be very gracious, but I won't ask for anything still. That's hard for me. Like to come to you and say, Charles, I need help. Yeah. You know, I need your advice. That's still a hard moment for me. Yeah. I, I, yeah, I resonate with that. For me, sometimes even to receive a compliment is difficult. I'll kind of brush it off. You know, someone might, might say, yeah, your book really changed my life. And I'll be like, well, you know, it was just the catalyst. You were having that change anyway. So you, you know, invited that book into your life. And I'll say, and that might be metaphysically true. You know, it's not like I'm the life changer, but energetically, I'm kind of pushing away the gratitude. Right. And I'm, I'm learning to take it in now without kind of, you know, minimizing it with some self deprecating joke or denying their experience of it, you know, it's really damaging to refuse a gift. Yeah. It is, is, it keeps us separate. Yeah. Yeah. Instead to just come up with, thank you so much for telling me that that's important for me to know. Yeah. Because it is. Right. Yeah, same thing. So that's a, that's a, and that's, that's such a clear way to build this social capital to put that capital term in, but, but this idea of it's time to reengage, I think with the larger world. I think that, you know, by the numbers, the culture we built for ourselves, we would not rebuild it if we just sat down clinically with the numbers like, well, let's look at things. Where are we obesity and psychoactive drug use and workplace violence and prison population, children with, with, you know, psychological issues based on the way that we're reining and training and putting them into the, to the school to prison pipeline, as you put it and all of that, we might say, gosh, there's some things here we wouldn't recreate intentionally. I often think of like, you know, going back a few thousand years and interviewing some people and saying, okay, so, you know, here's where this road leads to a world where you never see the stars. You never see the Milky Way. You never hear silence. Every single second of your life, you can hear an engine if you listen carefully. And, and you cannot drink from any of the streams anymore without fear. Like, do you, do you want to sign up for that? We take it for as normal. Yeah. Yeah. I interrupted you. Well, I know that sparks where I wanted to go with all this, which is, so one of the things I've learned and more of my spiritual questing side is that, and, and this is as close as I have this, this is my faith. Here's my faith. My faith is that the universe will always provide exactly what I need when I need it. I'm using the word need carefully. It's not what I want. Now your ego thinks it needs. No, no, my ego thinks it needs. And it's certainly not what I want, because sometimes what I need is a hard life lesson. So, you know, people had other expressions of this God works in mysterious ways. You know, why did he take my son? Why did this thing happen to me? And, and, but as long as you think there's some entity out there that personally levied that upon you, you know, this punishment, that's one, one way to look at it. The way I look at it now is that literally everything I need will be delivered to me, but our culture has got this story that nothing bad should ever happen to us. We should live in a risk free society. We won't have playgrounds outside because kids might fall and break an arm. So let's not do that. We'll put big rubber mats under everything. Or, you know, we have to live in a completely safe society, which from a psychological standpoint, little odd because we're reigning death on the world outside our borders. But inside, we're demanding complete safety at all moments from everything that might happen. Right. And, and that violates this tenant, which is to say that we can control outcome or that we should or that when air quotes bad things happen, that those shouldn't happen. And I'm of the view now that when things happen, they happen for a reason. Yes. So I've known people who got injured. And that was exactly the thing they needed to kick them out of their, where they were, which was not a great place for them into a greater expression of who they are in their gifts. Yeah. And some people say cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. Right. Or the heart attack. You know, this big real estate developer we knew back when we were back where I came from, you know, he was a hard ass businessman and gets his heart attack, turns into the jolly old elf. Like this happens a lot. And but what you're saying is actually tapping into a new mythology. I call it a new and ancient mythology that essentially denies that reality consists of a bunch of, you know, randomly interacting protons, neutrons and electrons, and a few hundred other particles that that are each one of them, just these generic masses that have no intelligence or purpose or consciousness, that the only intelligence purpose and consciousness in the universe resides in human beings. And therefore, that progress is the imposing of human intelligence onto nature. And that's the engineering mindset, you know, to order everything, to organize everything and to imprint our intelligence and our image onto everything. That's the old story. And the new story, which is also the ancient story says no, these qualities of intelligence and consciousness and purpose and and and all of the qualities of a self, those exist outside of ourselves too. And even in the events of our lives, these have an intelligence, even in the soil, the plants, animals. So it's kind of the the I look at it as the third stage of the Copernican Revolution, where we no longer put ourselves at the center, even psychologically. And we acknowledge that we live in a living intelligent conscious universe. And then when we acknowledge that, then no longer do we seek to dominate it. But we seek to listen to it. And that's what I think brings together a lot of the kind of alternative and holistic practices, right, you know, from agriculture to medicine. And you could even probably extend it to finance, you know, or to, to, they're all different kinds of service to something larger than ourselves. I agree. And I think of that's such a great point. And I think of this as an and not an or. It's not either we use our intelligence or, you know, we go back to some more archetypal, indigenous way. To me, it if you have the and in this story, the and is we are really intelligent, capable of shaping our our experience sort of a species. And if we were really intelligent, we would understand we would have a greater amount of humility around that, because the more we learn. So as a scientist, I learned this, the more you dig in, the more you realize how much you don't know, right? There's just like, you can go down that reductionist thing, but it's just like, even how a single cell functions, really functions, totally eludes us. It's so magnificently complex. And we're finding things out now. We're just discovering that the 100 trillion cells in our gut biome that have the first pass at processing the things that come in your body, actually have an impact on all kinds of things about your experience of health and well being neurological, psychological, nutrition, health, all that. And a study that just came out in the New York Times, they discovered that children of Holocaust survivors, they had noted for a long time, statistically were way more prone to anxiety and and depression and all kinds of things. And so now we've done the studies to prove that epigenetically, we can look at what's going on, that the people who had that experience, past that experience on to their children, cultural, wounding and trauma, right? We now are starting to understand the mechanism, which means our DNA is talking to the world. It's not you or Charles, this box, you were born with a genetic component, it's a strain, we can read it, decipher it and know you. Like, oh, no, no, no, no, it's way more complicated than that. We're in constant relationship, and we're more porous as entities than we understood. So with that, should come this humility that says, we don't really have, okay, we're smart, but there's a lot going on here that we don't get yet. And we should, we should reserve space for that. Yeah, yeah, I'm not trying to deny our human gifts. But to put them in service to, you know, rather than domination, but in service. And I guess we should probably wrap this up. But I'll just say one short thing. We were talking about causes and symptoms and really addressing the root cause. And I think it is this experience of separation that keeps us afraid, makes us want to dominate. And, and the antidote to that is really to spread love, generosity, kindness, compassion. And I think we're at a key moment to do that. And everybody listening to this can recognize that as their real work. And whatever work you're doing in the world is the vehicle for that. Because we're really in crunch time, and it's time to act from that story. Yeah, it's time to bring out your greatness. All right. I'm very good. Thank you for this conversation. It's been wonderful. Yeah, likewise. You've been listening to a new and ancient story with me, your host Charles Eisenstein. To engage more deeply, you can join our community on new and ancient story.net, where we have live chats, forums, meetups, and all kinds of other tools for collaboration. If you want to find out more about my work, then visit my website, CharlesEisenstein.net.