The Most Important Book About Money I've Ever Read - Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition With Charles Eisenstein.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, breakdown of community to its logical extreme, which is life in a bubble. You would hold a huge feast and invite everybody. They would eat it all and you have none left. But what do you have? When people understand that I'm serious, that they are equally welcome if they pay zero, there's like a sigh of relief because they're like something that's just not all about the money as a universal means. It then became a universal end and we have that mentality. If only I had the money, could do anything I wanted.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. So the podcast that you are about to hear is an interview with an author, really wonderful thinker, who I discovered several months ago, probably about eight to nine months ago. And this guy is a depth of wisdom and I'm actually surprised more people don't know about him and his writing because it is epic and meaningful and life changing and the world needs it right now. And I'm going to talk to him. So later on in the introduction you'll find out who he is. Hey folks, I first discovered the guest on my show today when I actually read this wonderful essay. It was called the Coronation. The essay was, it was actually a little bit more about like the Pandemic and Covid written early on in the process and since then have kind of followed the author of that particular article and as a result have been opened up to a whole host of wonderful writings, essays and books alike. Probably the book that most impressed me and moved me that this fellow wrote though is called Sacred Economics. As a matter of fact, I found Sacred Economics to be such a good book that I recently wove it into the educational curriculum of my sons who are homeschooled. And they actually just yesterday turned in their book reports on this book, Sacred Economics, which they also went through. And I wish I'd have been exposed to this type of outside the box book but really necessary economical outlook when I was their age. They're 13 years old and I'm just so glad they got exposed to some of the material within this book that I want to share with you now. It's an important and transformative financial book. So anyways, my guest is Charles Eisenstein and Charles is a public speaker. He's an author. He covers everything from human civilization to economics to spirituality to ecology in his writings. I will link to his blog, I will link to this book as well as the other excellent books that he's written, including one I also recently read called the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. If you go to the show notes, they're all@bengreenfieldfitness.com sacredeconomics that's bengreenfieldfitness.com Sacredeconomics and while the book is thick and while there are. There are many, many areas that we can dive into, I'm gonna have a chat with Charles today just about some of the things that I found quite interesting. However, I would highly recommend that. That you go read the book, because whenever I do a podcast, it's never with the goal of making it so you shouldn't read the book, but instead to expose you to a lot of the cool things within. So, Charles, welcome to the show, man.

Yeah, thanks, Ben. Thanks for that very kind introduction as well.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And like I just mentioned, there's so many places that we could start and so much information I found super helpful in the book. But, you know, I guess the title of the book is the first thing that really stands out because, you know, you get into this a little bit, you know, how we're in this age of scientism and logical thought and rational thought and provable concepts, and as a result, it kind of seems like we've lost touch with this concept of sacredness. I just recently interviewed two different botanist and herbalists who talked about how we've lost the sacred intelligence of plants or connection with the sacred intelligence of plants. Being able to listen to plants, learn from plants, understand plants as. As living creatures, and just not, you know, breakdownable molecul. And your book kind of reminded me of some of those chats that I had with those folks. I guess my first question for you is, you know, in terms of the sacred element of the world around us, you know, even. Even beyond just economics, how much have we actually changed, in your opinion, in terms of losing that sacredness? And how would you even define what that sacredness is?

Well, those botanists actually are very close to what I think sacredness is because they're talking about relating to plants and not just as a collection of chemicals, but as beings. To relate to somebody as a full being, that's the door to seeing them as a sacred being. It's almost unavoidable. Like, if you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're not going to see them as, you know, a member of some dehumanized category. If Jeff Bezos looks eye to eye with one of his employees, he's not going to just be an employee anymore. The idea is that the sacred is not only to be found in some things and not others. And it's not some separate realm from the material. I mean, either everything is sacred or nothing is sacred. So the question is, how has this sacred world been made in our perception and experience into something not sacred? And a lot of that has to do with money. Like when people cause harm in the world, when they destroy nature, when they exploit each other. And you ask, why are they doing that? When you ask why? A few levels down, it comes down to money. Why? Money is just an agreement about value. Why should money turn the world into a collection of things and consumers and markets and commodities? Like, why? What is it about money? And how could we make it again as sacred as everything in the world actually is?

So when you talk about monetization of an economy or money itself kind of contributing to removing sacredness from culture, can you give me an example of how that would actually happen?

Well, every time a forest gets converted into X number of board feet of lumber, or when community relationships where people took care of each other, knew each other, sang together, worked together, when those get replaced by paid services, for example, childcare, whereas 100 years ago, the kids were running around in packs and everybody knew all the kids. And they learned by watching adults and participating in their activities. Like that has been professionalized, made into a service. This is the process by which, like, I consider relationships sacred. But now, because of the monetization of the economy, we don't do things for each other so much anymore, but we purchase the substitute. And even today in an Amish community, for example, if your house burns down, the whole community gets together to help you rebuild. So you don't need insurance. But for most of us, that community function has been converted into a service called insurance. One example of a broad phenomenon which is basically the conversion of nature into products and the conversion of relationships or community into services.

Basically, would you say that a part of this is related to the introduction of money, almost causing us to view other people more transactionally, thus removing some of the sacredness from relationships?

When you live a highly monetized life, then you don't need the people around you. Like, say, if I. If I am living in, I don't know, a frontier town, you know, in the 19th century, I need the blacksmith. I need the, you know, town doctor. You know, I need the barrel maker. I need, like, every person as an individual. Because if I don't have a good relationship with them, then I cannot simply take my Business elsewhere because the people in that community depend on each other all the more. So if we're living in a hunter gatherer tribe today, we don't have that. I like my neighbors just fine, but I don't need any of them. They could stop fulfilling their role, whatever their role is, and it won't affect me at all. So how can you have community when underneath it all, you know that you don't actually need each other for anything?

So you said that the creation of money, or at least the type of monetization system that we have right now is creating a scenario in which we actually don't need communities.

I mean, do you need community to meet any measurable need?

I guess it depends on what you mean by need. Because, like, I recognize I need community for my happiness. I've recognized that that's where a lot of my joy resides, is in like the evening dinner parties and things like that that we throw. I rely on it, I suppose, you know, for emotional and for spiritual health, I guess, for like, survival. I don't really feel like I need a community. You know, I have, I have Amazon. I, I make money on the Internet. Like, I don't feel like I have to walk up to my neighbor's house to get eggs.

Know the design of the money system that currently prevails requires that the realm of money continue to grow. The economy doesn't work if it's, if there's no growth. As soon as growth stops, then you have rising debt, bankruptcies, all kinds of problems. Like the economy has to keep growing. So what does that actually mean? It has to find some area of life that has not been monetized yet and convert that into money. So we have, as a result, more and more human functions mediated by technology, which on some level we pay for and by money. At some point we have to decide, okay, that's enough. Like, I'm not going to be better off replacing whatever's left of community. Like, this is what happened under Covid. Like you couldn't have your dinner party anymore, you couldn't go to a restaurant anymore, but you can still order to your house. It was taking the breakdown of community to its logical extreme, which is life in a bubble. And that was very profitable for the entities that provide those services, like Amazon. So for me it's, yeah, it's not like, it's not, I'm not saying like money is evil and that we shouldn't have it, but what I'm really saying is the kind of money that we have right now requires and causes endless growth, no longer suits our needs. Because what we really need is not more of the things, not more commodities, more products. What we need is actually more connections.

Now when you talk about money and the idea of this whole gifting economy, that I think could be quite helpful in rebuilding the sacredness of community and the sacredness of interaction amongst humans. You kind of talk about how it's a little bit of a myth. And this actually surprised me because I wasn't aware of this, that that money began as a bartering exchange mechanism. Like, I always just assumed that, you know, I guess ancient man had like seashells or shiny objects or cool looking rocks and declared some value around those or traded them with others to receive some gift in kind as a bit of like a bartering exchange. But you know, you seem to think that the origin of money might be a little bit different in terms of not necessarily having origination as a bartering mechanism. Am I understanding you the right way?

Yeah. Anthropology doesn't support the barter theory of the origin of money.

Really?

Yeah. Ancient societies, stone age societies, those that were observed up until the 20th century, they rarely used barter. They used it about as often as we use it under special circumstances. But usually they lived in a gift economy. So if, say you were a very successful hunter, okay, and you brought home some big game, way more than you could eat, no one ever anywhere would in these societies, dry the meat, smoke the meat and use it to trade for other things. Usually what would happen, you would hold a huge feast and invite everybody to come to your feast, and they would eat it all and you have none left. But what do you have? You have gratitude, you have the esteem of the community, you have reputation of somebody who holds really great feasts. And so now you're going to get invited to everybody else's feast and people are feeling grateful to you. They're going to give you the things that you need. Maybe someone will give you. Like the person who makes the best arrows is going to give you arrows because they know that you're going to go get more meat and have another feast. So basically, pre monetary societies were societies in which everybody was in debt to everybody else, Everybody was in gratitude to everybody else.

So what would have happened? Let's say I'm the guy throwing a feast and I need a cow for beef for my ancient hamburger, and I'm going to go out and try to figure out how to get a cow. Are you saying that just because I'm the type of person that throws dinner parties and have that type of reputation that someone's going to then gift me a cow because they know I'm going to gift them with a dinner party.

It's more of like long standing relationships and customs. Your marriageable daughter is being wooed by several of the young men, you know, and to prove their worth and their, their, their ability to provide, they make gifts to the father of the potential bride. And one of those gifts is a cow. There's complicated customs around kinship ritual and that, that basically tell you who to give what to and how much under what circumstances. That's how the societies worked. And there's even a little vestige of this in modern societies. Say I'm traveling somewhere and let's say I stay at your house, okay? I'm not going to pay you to be your house guest. Now I might give you a house gift, but it's not going to be equal in value to a stay. It's a token, right?

Right.

But something remains from that hospitality. One thing is that if you're traveling, if you're in my area, you're going to feel free to ask, hey, mind if I stay over at your place? Or you'll feel free to ask me a favor. Because we've established a relationship. And that's in contrast to a monetary transaction where if I stay at a hotel and I pay my bill, we both know that I don't owe you anything, you don't owe me anything. There's no obligation after the transaction. But gift transactions always leave a tie between the giver and the receiver. So writ large in a tribe, in a community, in a village that runs on gift economy, there's been thousands, millions of these transactions over generations, these acts of giving and receiving. I mean, everyone's tied to everybody, right?

Well, it's almost like karma to a certain extent, where you almost have this trust because relationships aren't entirely transactional, that if you are gifting that a gift in kind will eventually come back to you. Almost like a, like a karma based aspect of an economy.

And it's not just a spiritual principle because you see it happening every day, right? You see it every day that the most generous person is the wealthiest because everybody wants to be nice to them too, which is the opposite today. Today, like if you want to accumulate wealth, you better not give too much of it to charity and to your, you know, no good brother in law and to this person and that person, then there'll be none left for you. That's what our economy shows us. So it goes contrary to the spiritual principle of karma that you're, that you're articulating. But in a healthy society, there's no contradiction.

I mean, like playing devil's advocate or let's, let's say somebody does own a hotel or they own an Airbnb, you know, are you saying in a situation like this? Because I remember some example in your book of like, a plumber coming over, and they just leave you with a list of their expenses and you decide, you know, if we're in a gifting economy, what expenses those you want to cover, how much you want to reward the plumber, whether you want to barter with them and give them something that's of similar value, whether you just want to, I don't know, wait a couple weeks down the line and invite them to one of your dinner parties. I mean, like, what does it actually look like, let's say, in the case of a hotel or an Airbnb, if we were to remove that amount of monetization?

I mean, that's the thing. Like, we don't have a culture of gift. We don't have an economy set up that way. People don't have the habits of gift, and we don't have community. You can't just pole vault into gift economy from where we are right now. It's a matter of taking the next step. Here's one reason it doesn't work. If you are in a real community, say in a medieval village or something, say that you are stingy, or say that you're in a hunter gatherer tribe and you don't fulfill your obligations to share and to give very quickly, you're going to be ostracized. You're going to be. People are going to turn their backs on you. They're not going to give you anything, and you're not going to be very happy. You might not even be able to survive if everybody's your enemy. Well, we don't have that in our current setting. So far away from a culture and psychology of gift, if you tried to do that, oh, yeah, I'm going to open an Airbnb. And you decide you don't have to pay. You know, it's going to be a gift. Well, the people who come and stay at your Airbnb, they're not in your community. There's no social mechanism to make sure that those in need are recognized by those who have surplus. So this is not like some trivial idealistic thing. It's like, oh, let's all just be in gift. We don't have the culture right now for it. And so what my book was about is how do we take a step back toward gift economy? How can we change money so that it embodies a little bit, at least of the principles of gift? And then maybe, like, maybe there are parts of our lives where we can step more into gift, where we can, we can like, you know, I certainly use money, but I do it on gift subscriptions. All of my events, everything is, you choose, the price could be zero.

So, so like, if somebody wants to come, like hire you to come speak at their event, it's pretty much you'll show up and what they want to gift via your website is what they wind up giving to.

That depends on the event. You know, if it's like some kind of conference or some kind of thing where people are paying a lot of money. Like I want to be paid as any other top speaker would be paid just to do honor to my work. But yeah, I often go to things for free. But when I hold my own events, if it's just like a one off, you know, where I'm going to speak somewhere, then I always do the tickets by gift. So you can pay zero. You could pay, you know, $100, you could pay whatever, which I like because some people like genuinely do not have money and they're like struggling to pay for groceries. I don't want them to pay. You know, I'm like, yeah, I don't want you to pay. Then there's people who have way more money than they, than they can use. So I would certainly like them to give a lot more. So I say, yeah, I trust. What is the right amount for you? Because we have an inner, an inner compass.

How often do you experience people taking advantage of that? That's related to like a bigger picture question that I have because I was thinking about this idea of a gift based economy rather than a transactional economy. And like, isn't it kind of based on the underlying assumption that, that people are going to make the right decisions, that people are good, that they're going to be generous, that they're not going to steal from you or take advantage from you?

Yes. And in a traditional gift economy, that assumption is very well warranted because of the social pressures that I described. You know, you can pretty much trust that people, like, if you're, if you're stingy, if you're ungrateful, if you don't honor your obligations, you're not going to do very well. In our current situation, it is a bit more of a leap of trust. But I find that this desire to live in gift is almost instinctual in human beings, and that when I trust people, they tend to rise to the level of the trust. Sometimes people will, as you say, take advantage of it. But, you know, I run, like, online courses. There's, you know, like, at least generally 40 or 50% of the people will pay something. And it's not because there's premier premium content that they only access if they pay. It's absolutely complete. It's completely open. Like, there's no paywall. There's no. No, no content behind a paywall. And my model works. Been working for. For years.

How scalable do you think that is? Like, in terms of. And this might be putting the cart ahead of the horse, you know, before we get a chance to explain a little bit more about what a gifting economy would look. Do you think that that type of concept, that gifting economy, is something that's currently scalable, or do we need a pretty big overhaul in order for that to happen?

Yeah, I mean, especially for digital products, where the cost, the marginal cost of production is essentially zero. It doesn't actually cost if one more person subscribes to your podcast. It's not like you're producing widgets, and each widget has a certain cost. The natural price in economics, the natural price for anything that has a zero marginal cost of production, the natural price is zero. And the only way that digital commerce, you know, for software, for music, for, like, anything that can be delivered in purely digital form, the only reason that people are paying for it is that we can make it artificially scarce by putting artificial barriers to receiving it. And, you know, people can get around those barriers and. Or you can put advertising on it. Right. Say, like, money weren't an issue. And you could choose, do I want advertising on my podcast or not? Do I want advertising on my website or not? Is it going to make it actually look good to have some Nike ads on my website? You know, no. No one actually wants it to make it for aesthetic reasons. So the. The model that I use, and I sometimes actually coach others in adopting it, it's really natural. This is actually not costing me anything to give this to you. I mean, the first to create one copy, that's a lot of work. You know, if I make an online.

Course, yeah, there's like, intellectual capital there. There's research. There's time put into learning it and packaging it and then turning around and figuring out how you're going to teach it.

Right. The first copy, huge amount of work, the second copy, zero. And people you know, on some level know that. So that's why I say you decide what feels good to you, what represents your feeling of value, your feeling of gratitude, your desire to support my work. You know, maybe you reference the going market price for such things, or maybe it's just a gut instinct when people understand that I'm serious, that there's no trick, that they are equally welcome if they pay zero. There's like a sigh of relief because they're like, finally something that's just not all about the money. I mean, haven't you had this experience, like there's some awesome online course or some program or something, and you read about it and all the bullet points, it looks great, and then at the very bottom, it's always saved for the very bottom. There's the price.

Yeah, you're right.

Like, there's a letdown. And what I'm saying is it is not necessary to do that. You can monetize by gift. And I wish, like, I was trying to get the ear of, what's that guy's name, Duroff, the founder of Telegram, because he was like, how do I, how do I, you know, run a platform with tens of millions of users? You know, how do I monetize it? I'm like, give people an easy way to donate and you will have no problem. And you will be completely independent of advertisers, of, you'll be financially independent people. People are happy to give a return gift for something for which they are grateful. That's human nature.

That makes sense. Like, I'm actually part of a new, like, decentralized social media platform that's based on cryptocurrency that I've been using lately called BitCloud. And on BitCloud, I can produce social media content in the same way that I would on, let's say, Twitter. A helpful video link to a study with a comment about what I've taken away from that study, or where others can learn, etc. And rather than there being likes, which I suppose would be like a form of social currency to a certain extent, on Twitter, you can award diamonds which are linked to a certain, you know, like one diamond might award someone, you know, 50 cents or something like that for a helpful post. And you can also, you know, the different influencers on that platform, they have, have coins, like creator coins. So you can, you can invest in or, or buy into using the trading medium on that particular platform, which is called clout, an ownership in that person and their intellectual capital so that you might profit to a certain extent as that person's social influence increases. But ultimately you kind of choose what you want to award other people on the platform based on the value that they've provided to you. Although of course there is a monetization, since it's all tied to crypto. And at some point you'd imagine someone is going to have a certain amount of clout on the platform and then cash that out for US Dollars. So there's still some monetization, but it's at least like voluntarily gifting or giving to someone based on the value that you perceive offered to you.

Yeah, so that's kind of a hybrid. That's not like fully in the spirit of gift.

Right.

The hallmark of gift is that you let go of any specific return. If it's not that, then it's an investment. And I'm not saying investment is bad, but it's not gift.

Where or why would money have arisen in the first place? Right? Like if we don't need it, if it is something that makes relationships more transactional, if it reduces some of the, the sacredness that we might attach to other humans or even to our belongings themselves, why would money have risen in the first place? Didn't it just start as like a trading mechanism that was tied to something like gold, for example?

It was required in order to run a society with a high degree of division of labor and mass scale.

What do you mean by that?

Ancient societies, when they developed agriculture and food surpluses, then they had a division of labor which, you know. So because of the food surpluses, people could become artists, become craftsmen. Not everybody had to be a farmer. They could become philosophers, they could develop technology. And as these things co developed with food surpluses, like you had cities, the hinterland could produce enough food to support a city. You could have culture, you'd have kings, you'd have priests. So as the scale of society grew, ordinary gift economics no longer work. Because for a gift economy to work, you have to. Everybody's gifts need to be visible. Like you have to know who's being generous and who isn't being generous. And you have to be able to match gifts with needs. But when you have like, say, well, take it to this point, you know, if you have somebody who's designing microchips, you know, he needs food. There's no farmer that needs microchip design, right? Hey, I'll design your microchips in exchange for, you know, a bushel of carrots. You need, you need some medium of exchange that everybody agrees has value. That's what, that's. That's how money arose and became necessary. You have to have some way. Even if you said, okay, we're going to abolish money, all right, how are you going to match gifts and needs? How are you going to allocate resources in a way that benefits society and makes sure that selenium is reaching the microchip manufacturers? I don't even know if they use selenium, but you know what I mean? You have to have some way to coordinate all that money serves that function. It's like a signaling molecule in a body. This is not some simplistic thing of let's abolish money or let's let computers do all the allocation. In a technologically developed mass society with division of labor, you need something. For civilization as we know it to develop, we needed something like money.

Are you basically saying that we have reached a point in civilization where we can let that concept go? Like, are you saying that money is necessary for civilization to grow to a certain extent and then can be left aside for a more gifting based economy?

I think that we still will need money or something that serves its function for quite a long time in the future, but that the realm of money, the domain of money, it can stop growing and it could even shrink a little bit. And some of the things that we source with money, we could source in other ways.

So. So money then originally would have been almost like, rather than a piece of, let's say, I don't know, a shell or a rock or something tied to the intrinsic value of gold. Money instead would have been a sign of a social agreement. Like, you gave me this, and therefore I'm giving you this as a sign that you gifted XYZ to me and that I might owe you something relatively equivalent to that in the future.

Well, the original money, I mean, this gets into more history. And for that I recommend David Graeber's book called debt the first 5,000 years. But money kind of had a dual origin. One of them was a system of tallies where if you were a farmer and you took your grain to the central temple, I. E. Granary, then you would receive, they'd mark down how much you donated. That record then entitled you to certain things. The tokens of that entitlement could be traded and that kind of became money. The other origin of money was like special gifts. Like it could be seashells, cowrie necklaces, or it could be gold and silver, Something that was used to facilitate the rearranging of relationships, especially marriage. Like if somebody marries into your family, you actually recognize this is a human being with no finite value. It's an infinite value, a human being. But I'm going to give something in recognition of the sacredness of this gift of a human being to my family.

Right. So it was like a sign or a symbol, but did not carry a host of intrinsic value in and of itself.

It wasn't that the bride was being bought for, you know, five cowrie necklaces and 30 goats. It was that these were given in recognition of the sacredness of the relationship. Same thing with blood money. Like, if a murder took place, then it wasn't that that the blood money was considered adequate compensation, but it was a token of, wow, I'm really sorry, and I will try to set this to rights. And here's this precious thing that is only used for transactions of this kind. So that. That's. Yeah, that's. There's a lot of history there that I'm not an expert on, but that's the gist of it.

Yeah. But ultimately, once money becomes the actual valuable item itself, rather than a sign or a symbol of a deeper underlying relationship between two human beings or two entities, I believe that the argument that you present in the book is that you create almost like a hoarding of that trading medium that's been assigned value, like money, and therefore create almost like this. This sense of scarcity, like the desire to hoard this value and. And thus, you know, create almost like a. Like a rift between those who have hoarded successfully and those who are unable to hoard to that same extent.

Yeah. So hoarding comes about in part because money, as society became monetized, it became more and more true that if you only had money, you could have everything. As more and more things entered the realm of purchase, entered the realm of monetary transaction, then the more important money became to source everything you need in life. So money became a universal means. And as a universal means, it then became a universal end. And we have that mentality, if only I had the money, I could do anything I wanted. That's what financial independence means. Now, when you achieve it, you realize that it's not actually true, but it sure seems true in an economy where everything has a price. So money becomes a universal end, and how much of it is enough to meet every need that you could possibly imagine?

Right. And then that. That winds up basically turning everything into a viable commodity. Thus, then, you know, once everything becomes a commodity, there is no longer a great amount of Sacredness, meaning that, like whatever, my 2014 Toyota Highlander is replaceable. It's a commodity. It has a monetary value associated with it. And thus, because of that, I might, for example, feel as though, rather than caring for that car, taking into account the carbon footprint of replacing it or driving it into the ground, without actually looking as a sacred object that I own, care for as a family heirloom, that I might develop an intimate relationship, learn how to repair, and learn how to have some amount of ownership over. It basically is a commodity with a certain amount of value that is eventually replaceable. And thus you create almost like this rapid or necessary growth of goods and services that. And you get into this in your book, seems to have some pretty deep underlying environmental implications as well.

That's right. If you can replace it with a certain amount of money, it gets reduced to that. Like, when we ask, what is the value of something and we give the answer in dollars, we're saying that that is all it is. I'm sure that you have things, though, that have a value to you that cannot be expressed in money because they carry a relationship with them. Something that your grandmother gave you, the baseball glove that your father gave you and played baseball with you as a kid. There's objects that have sentimental value that escape the valuing, that escape financial valuing. Imagine how rich we would be if we were surrounded in all aspects of our lives with objects that had this kind of sentimental value, objects that were made by somebody who loved you or cared about you or knew you. Like, I have some garments like that. Like, somebody made them for me. I can literally not buy something made for me with love. Like, no matter how much money I have, I cannot pay somebody to love me.

Right. But you could think about doing so. Like, you could look up the value of that object that you'd receive, like, let's say, compare it on Etsy or Amazon or whatever, and actually in doing so, reduce some of the sacredness that's associated with it. And, you know, any. Anything that's. That's replaceable all of a sudden becomes less sacred. And I totally get that. And, you know, one of the things that you get into in the book, though, and this is really important to me as a creative, as a maker, as somebody who loves to create. I love to write fiction, I love to make music, yet those activities really don't make me money. And I'm hardwired just based. I grew up in a family that was really probably a little bit more operating on the spirit of scarcity, on Hoarding on, saving on going on vacation and just basically sitting around a hotel room because we spent all the money getting to where we were going. So, you know, God forbid we spend more money actually enjoying that location. And, you know, this, this, you know, creativity and adventuring, etcetera, Seem to become stifled because either profit or. Or ensuring that trading medium of money was not lost resulted in almost like a stifling of enjoyment or creativity. And that seems to be the issue with a lot of artists, a lot of creatives who don't wind up doing what it is that they're called to or what it is that they know that they were created for to a certain extent in terms of their life's purpose, because, you know, those type of practices, like art and creativity, et cetera, they're not highly rewarded in most cases.

Yeah, I mean, that's beyond artists, too. Like, most of the most beautiful and necessary work that needs to be done on this planet is not financially rewarding. Right. It's as simple as if you want to go out and plant trees, it's going to be a lot harder to get that funded then, like, if you go to the bank with a business plan and your business plan is, I'm going to plant 10,000 trees, and they're like, oh, are you going to start a, you know, lumber plantation and do that? No, no, no, I'm not going to have them cut down. I'm going to plant ecologically important trees that shouldn't be cut down. The bank is like, well, that's very touching, Ben, but we're not going to lend you money because how are you going to pay us back? But if you go to the bank with a business plan to cut down a forest, dig a strip mine there, and then pave it over for a strip mall, and they're like, yeah, we'll lend you that money because here's how you will pay us back. So the system operates even without any ill will. The banker isn't evil. You're not evil. Like, you need that money to support your family, you know, to pay your bills. Like, this is like, we're all kind of locked into a system that on some level no one really believes in, and that doesn't serve anybody.

Yeah. And it's weird because it's almost like considered to be a laudable, noble thing. You know, even I have raised, you know, my own son's this way to a certain extent that, oh, well, you can do this cooking podcast and here's how you can make it profitable. Or, you know, here's, here's this, this, this essay you wrote. We should put this onto a short story in a magazine, you know, make some money off it. Or you could take this wonderful art that you've created and sell it on Etsy. And I've just always kind of had this concept that, yeah, that's really cool, that you could create and then profit could be the aim. You, you seem to just basically make this point in a really, really well thought out way that the aim of profit stifles creativity. The thought like, how can I make money from this? Is something that in an economy where the end goal is to actually hold onto this trading medium, this money, that, that question, rather than that question of how can we make money from this, replaces like, how can I make this more beautiful? Or how can I be more creative?

I wouldn't say it necessarily stifles creativity. Like, people can be very creative in making money, but it directs creativity in a certain way away from what we actually need the most right now. That's why a lot of people, they are very creative, but they're working jobs where that creativity is hijacked towards something that they don't actually care about. And so then they go through life feeling like they're not living their real life, they're living a life they're paid to live and it's. And then eventually maybe they start self sabotaging or they get addicted to something or they get sick and it's not because, you know, like they're, they're a sellout or something like that. This is a difficult situation that we are in. However, it's also true in many people. Well, for one thing, there is beautiful work that does bring in money and often what we think we have to do, otherwise it won't work out financially. Partly it's true in many situations, but partly it's also in our minds, it's our assumptions about things that may not be true.

Yeah. And you know, I think part of that too is a spirit of fear, a spirit of scarcity. And I think even just a lack of trust in this idea that you can be taken care of or that people will gift you or reward you if you create something beautiful in this world. And part of that is because we don't have of a sense system created that actually allows for that type of reward to take place, which of course would require some of the solutions that you lay out in the book. And one of the things that seems to contribute to this issue quite a bit, and this was interesting for me because I just finished a book called Makers vs. The Takers. And it was essentially about how a huge, huge part of the message of Jesus Christ in the New Testament was all based around the idea that usury or interest was creating a real big problem in that day, and appears to still be. But how would you describe the problem with interest or what some people might call usury?

Yeah, it's interesting. Islam still prohibits interest. Christianity prohibited it for up until, like the Middle Ages.

Did they prohibit it or did they weave in? Because my understanding was that interest was not prohibited, but what was woven in was like this year of jubilee, where all debts were forgiven after a certain period of time.

No, that was before. That was before the Christian era.

Yeah.

The Catholic Church prohibited interest. There are all kinds of workarounds, as there are in the Islamic world today. Jewish tradition also prohibited interest among Jews. Jews were not allowed to charge each other interest.

So what's the problem with interest?

Well, for one thing, it creates a situation where whoever has the money gets more and more of it. So it tends to create accumulation, inequality and scarcity.

So basically, hoarding without redistribution of wealth rewards.

Hoarding.

Right.

Which is the opposite of a hunter gatherer society, where hoarding is stupid.

Right. If. If holding on to whatever those seashells or rocks or whatever someone had given to you as a symbol or a sign that you had given something of value to them, if hoarding that were somehow rewarded because you were given little extra pieces of shells or rocks as a result of you hoarding, then the scenario that would be created would be eventual redistribution, distribution of wealth.

Not to mention the fact that you were usually nomadic and that many things wouldn't keep. And this would be true for, like, ancient farmers too. Like, you could hoard your grain or your apples or, you know, other things, but they're gonna get eaten by rats, you know, they're gonna go moldy and so forth. The thing about money, though, that makes it different from everything else in the world and therefore not sacred, is that in our current system, it grows exponentially merely by the fact of having it. Because of a system of usury, you can make risk free interest. If you have enough money, you can, you know, I mean, in this day and age, you can invest it in risky investments, knowing the government will bail them out if they fail. That's risk free interest. So if a certain small proportion of society who already have a lot of money have a guarantee of making more and more of it, what does that mean? It means less and less for everybody else, greater and greater Debt, unpayable debt. Huge numbers of people in our society have no hope of ever paying off their debt. Student debt, for example. I'm sure many people listening to this can relate to that. Why should that be? Why should you have to go into debt just to be a fully functioning member of society to get an education that was almost free? Two generations ago, Public universities were virtually free. Why are we poorer now in that sense than we were in 1960? Why can we no longer afford public parks and libraries and all these services?

Education, yeah, it creates a very consumption based economy too, because the debt becomes greater than the money supply. So you have to create new money that creates a future need for even more money. That amount of money needs to grow over time. And the new money goes to people who produce goods and services. So in an economy driven by interest, it necessitates the continual production of goods and services which kind of returns full circle back to that concept of sacredness. Right? If, if there's a constant production of goods and services, there's a constant need or drive or pressure to consume those goods and services rather than to hold on to say, like the sacred goods that you already have and thus you, you continue to strip the sacredness out of the belongings that people actually do own.

That's right. There's, there's always more debt than there is money when money is created by debt. You know, back when I wrote it, this was not so well known that money is created by debt.

Yeah, well, actually explain what you mean by that just a little bit. Just people better wrap their hands around it in case I did a really crappy job explaining it.

Well, like on the level of the central bank, they create money through the purchase of securities like treasury bonds and things like that on the open market. So like say the Federal Reserve buys $10 billion worth of securities. Where did they get that money? Where does this, where does the Federal reserve get that $10 billion? Do you know?

I assume by the printing of money.

That's right. They just write a number in, they type a number into a computer, and that $10 billion then goes to the account of whoever held the securities. The securities now are the property of the Federal Reserve. Well, those securities bear interest, don't they? So they bought $10 billion of securities. When it comes time to redeem them, they're worth say $15 billion. So somebody then has to pay that. Like when they redeem them, $15 billion has to be paid when the Fed had only created 10 billion. So where's that extra 5 billion come from? That's the dilemma. And that is replicated on the level of commercial lending. Where does that extra 5 billion come? It comes from additional lending that's happened in the interim. So that's what you were describing.

Right. And it tends to create people into almost like slaves as well. I mean, you give a perfect example of, you know, let's say you're going to help some African woman in a village to purchase a cow and you're going to perhaps, let's say, send her the money that she would need to purchase the cow, but attach a certain amount of interest to it. Well, it sounds like that's great because you're injecting this little village with money and a cow and the ability to be able to create a robust economy around the milk or the beef that that cow might produce. But then at the same time, they're going to have to figure out a way at some point to repay the interest on that monetary loan that you gave them, thus dictating that you're essentially creating an economy, a miniature economy of what we've already got going on here, where people are producing more and more goods and services in order to create the wealth that allows them to turn around and repay the debt to us versus, say, a scenario of you seeing a need for a cow and just like gifting that village a cow.

And this is what happens like on a. On a larger scale with development lending. Billions of dollars are lent to countries all over the world. Say South America, say it's Ecuador, say Bolivia. Okay, here's $10 billion in development loans at 7% interest. So by the year 2030 or whatever, you're going to have to pay us back 20 billion. Where does that 20 billion come from? Well, it comes from the export of minerals, oil, lumber, labor, whatever that country can offer to raise the foreign exchange to pay back those debts. So basically, it's a tool of empire where the tribute they send to the imperial center all of these things, all of these resources, and in return, what do they get? They get numbers in the computer. And that is the arrangement that has persisted throughout our lifetimes.

Yeah, and. And that. That idea of debt forgiveness, by the way, I was kind of thinking about that. I was actually talking about this with somebody the other night at dinner, and they said, well, if. If you weave debt forgiveness into a system almost like the ancient Israelites did in the year of jubilee, why don't you get a bunch of people just taking advantage of each other, right?

Like.

Like basically taking on loans or taking gifts and knowing that seven years down the road, any type of obligation or interest that attached to that gift is going to dissolve then once you just have a bunch of people running around taking advantage of each other. But I guess my response was, well, yeah, that'll happen once. And then once somebody finds out that you're not the type of person who repays or re gifts or somehow recirculates the goodness that was given to you, then you or your family or others related to you or involved with you would actually probably experience a scenario where you aren't really given any type of gift or any type of exchange like that in the future. So it's almost like a self regulating system.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what exactly the social conditions were in the time of the Jubilee and what kind of debt it extended to and so forth, but I do know that in our current time, some form of debt cancellation is necessary simply because the debts are now unpayable and people are sacrificing their well being, like living essentially in servitude to their debt. Debt peonage, it's called the level of student loan debt. Again, I want to mention that many people have no hope of ever paying that back in their lifetime. And not to mention consumer debt, credit card debt, business debt, sovereign debt. I mean, it's unpayable. So there has to be some kind of debt cancellation. How exactly that happens is a tricky matter. Because if you actually canceled all debt, you would cancel the debt that the bank owes to you that you call your savings account. That's a debt that the bank owes you. So it's not so simple as just cancel all debt right away. But if we have another bailout, another financial bailout, it needs to be a debtor's bailout and not just a creditor's bailout. Last time the bailout was basically all the debts stay on the books. The debtors didn't get bailed out, the banks did, insurance companies did, but not the debtors. No one got any relief at all. And we've got to, you know, if there's another financial crisis, we have to demand that it's the debtors who get the relief.

Now, debt cancellation is just like one of the, one of the proposed fixes for shifting the economy towards a more sacred gifting and gratitude based economy that you describe in the book. You know, a system that, as you say, rewards towards flow and not accumulation. Creating rather than owning and giving and not necessarily having. That's essentially the thrust of your whole book. And while the Proposed change that you lay out in the book would of course take us hours and hours to cover on a podcast. And you lay it out quite well in the book. What would you say if you were to give people some ideas about the steps that you think we would need to take next? You know, just, just kind of like a quick and dirty summary to actually begin to shift towards a more sacred economy that's less focused on like redistribution of wealth and hoarding.

You know, I mean, I could go through, I could, I could do that, go through the six or seven pillars of the, of the book, but I guess I don't have a good sense who I'm speaking to right now, you know, like why? Why do you want to know that?

Well, I guess for people, my audience likes to hear just a few. They love to hear the theory behind a concept, but also just some practical tips if they want to help affect change or if they want to see what it would actually look like when fleshed out to begin to shift towards a more sacred economy. Obviously we talked a little bit about this concept of debt cancellation or less of a priority based on an interest based economy. What would be a few of the things for people to think about even if, let's say they weren't going to read the book, but they want to know a few of the ways that you might fix an economy that's in a scenario like the one that we're currently in?

Yeah, one of the important ones is to make money like grain, like iron, like anything that rusts or decays, like anything in nature that returns to its source and doesn't just grow exponentially over time. So to have money decay, to have a negative interest rate associated with money so that it no longer rewards hoarding, no longer rewards short term thinking. Because right now, are you better off having a million dollars right now or are you better off having 10,000 a year for 100 years? Same amount of money, same million. Right? But now you're better off having a million now because you could earn interest on it. Are you better off having a forest that can give you $10,000 a year of sustainable income, or are you better off cutting it all down now for a million dollars? Better off cutting it all down right now. And that's the way that the world is working. So that's why I write about negative interest economics. But even that, which is like one or two chapters of the book is a very long conversation. So anyone listening who is kind of into economics, they'll be like, well, what about speculation and what about wouldn't it discourage savings? And there's all kinds of questions that come up that require a long conversation. And for those who are not economics nerds, it's like, how is it going to help them to have this idea? So I've come, like, you know, back when I wrote the book, I had this fantasy that if I only laid out the brilliant solution, that people would read it and they'd be like, oh yeah, that makes sense, let's implement that. And policymakers and government people would eventually read it. And now I don't think that a change in the world is going to come by somebody's extremely persuasive, brilliant idea. I think it's going to come from our gut instinct toward, in the case of economics and debt and stuff, toward fairness, toward justice, toward compassion. Thinking like, this is just not right. And I don't know why, but I know that this is not right. And that's what attunes people. For one thing, it makes them able to let go of what we already have. Because we're facing times of increasing uncertainty, increasing tumult breakdown, and as systems break down, how hard do we hold onto them? Or can we let go and let the possibility of something new arise out of the chaos?

Yeah, yeah. It's almost as though it requires a bit of a shift in morality and in the way that we think of other people too. I mean, you even tell people in the book that if they are investors, part of the wealth created through investing is based on interest to a certain extent. That instead the creation of connections, the generation of gratitude and the reclamation and protection of the Commonwealth. And to a certain extent, the environment should be more of the goal instead of actually getting money to hoard. Essentially it involves an attitude that's more based on giving to other human beings, on living out the golden rule and expecting that A, that the gift that you've given will come back around, and B, that God will provide. I mean, I was actually, it's kind of funny because I was reading just this morning in the Book of Matthew where it says, do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but instead store up treasures in heaven. Well, it's kind of interesting because storing up treasures in heaven involves giving to others, loving others, loving God, savoring his creation, creating and making beauty. Whereas storing up treasures on earth basically involves hoarding, taking advantage of others, in many cases charging interest, almost like losing the sacredness of our interactions with others and our interactions with the Environment. Because ultimately money would be the bottom line in a scenario like that.

Right? Storing up treasures on earth would make sense if you were going to live forever.

Right? Right, exactly. It's not as though we're supposed to live like a pauper and not enjoy life. I think that's the fear that a lot of people have because they're just so used to this idea that money creates happiness, money creates freedom of time, money creates opportunity. When in fact you could make an argument that connections, that gratitude and that love can all do those same things.

The thing is, yes, money can buy you all of those things you mentioned, but the weird thing is people will go on accumulating it way beyond what's necessary for leisure and their physical well.

Being, which is super tempting. I mean, it actually is. To have enough money saved away to where you've got enough for a rainy day and then some, just in case is an incredibly tempting and palatable scenario because you feel confident, you feel cared for. But what if that same confidence or that same feeling that you were taken care of was a feeling generated by knowing that all the people around you and all your relationships were. Instead, what would take care of you and fuel you? Like being a trusted part of a village.

Yeah, the thing, especially as we enter uncertain times, no investment is actually secure. Not secure from the economy. And actually, of course, it's not secure from illness, from sudden death, from physical pain. I mean, there's a lot of things that money, like divorce, addiction, there's a lot of things that money cannot protect you from. I often fast forward myself to my deathbed where it's like finally, right in front of my face, plain as day, that I can't take anything with me. And in those moments, what am I going to treasure? It's exactly what you named as treasures laid up in heaven. Everything. All the love I've ever given, all the beauty that I've created. You know, like when you talk in a religious context, you talk about glorifying God. How do you actually do that? You know, it's not necessarily talking about how great God is, it's accepting the sacredness of his creation and participating in that creation. If you want to ask how do you use money in a godly way, it is as an instrument of beauty and healing. That's what does glory to God. To be like, yeah, I'm going to join in this creation, I'm going to be your proxy, I'm going to be your servant in this. And then it totally transforms what an investment means. It's not how much am I going to get in return, but it's how can I use this as an instrument of, of participation in creation?

Yeah. You know, there's so much in the book that you get into in terms of the practical ways in this, in which this should be applied. And you know, I interview, gosh, you know, so many business people, so many CEOs, so many execs, you know, I just interviewed a, you know, a guy who runs a venture capital firm on my show. And I think that so many people would benefit from reading this message and begin to think about it because it was a little bit overwhelming for me, me when I read the book and thought, jeez, it's going to take a world of change to be able to shift us from an interest based economy that is designed around hoarding wealth and not treating our objects nor our environment or our relationships as sacred yet. And this is really ultimately why I wanted to get you on the show, Charles, because I thought, well, if I can get this message out to just a few extra people who will read this book and begin to think about some of the concepts that are in it, then it hopefully will cause a little bit of the change necessary to shift us towards this scenario. And I think it's just going to take waking a lot of the giants so to speak up to the idea that what we're doing now is not sustainable long term for the environment or for our relationships or for our belongings or for our ultimate happiness. And the solution that you lay out in the book, I think is sound. And I would just love to see more people thinking about these concepts. And again, case in point, I wanted my sons to get through this and to have an understanding of what that type of sacred economy would look like. And I didn't even go to Amazon to buy them their books. I went to your website, I left donation for two books. I paid you what I. I thought that the information would actually be worth for me and my sons because I thought honestly it was actually worth, worth more than what the book was listed for on Amazon. But I did that because I understand what you're getting at and I see how if everybody began to think in this way that it would result in some meaningful change. So I guess my message to my listeners would be Charles and I basically just kind of discussed the reasoning behind the book. But to get into the practical nitty gritties, you need to read this book. And I think it's going to be one of the most important financial books that you've ever read. There's a section on my bookshelf where there's all the books that I come back to each year and about, I don't know, maybe three to five books a year get shelved on that shelf and this one is going up there. So I'm going to link to the book and also to Charles website as well as. If you don't have time to read this book right now, but you just want to wrap your head around some of the ways that Charles thinks, go read that, that essay, the Coronation, which I thought was just really good. I assume it's, it's not taken down on your website yet, Charles.

Now it's still there. It's, it's. I mean some of the stuff is a lot of date, you know, some of the stuff like as the way things played out, it was not quite the way I thought but other things on like, like the prediction that they're gonna, I'm like how do we know this is ever gonna end? They're gonna come up with new mutants, new variants, new viruses. Like that part because I was like, you know, no, this is not gonna be three weeks to flatten the curve, you know. So a lot of the stuff did actually play out as I feared.

Yeah. So anyways, I've read a lot of the articles on your blog. I've read this book Sacred Economics. I've read the book the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know as Possible. And I think just because of that I'm a better, more informed person. And I just am tickled pink that I get to share this information with my audience. And so I'm going to put the shownotes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SacredEconomics for those of you who want to dive in a little bit more. And that's also where you can leave your comments and your questions and your feedback and your own thoughts about whether or not you think a gifting or gratitude based economy is complete bunk or whether you too are ready to see a little bit of change. Charles, I wish I had like three hours to talk to you because there's just like so many dog eared pages folded over in this book. But ultimately I appreciate you giving your time and coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us and making people aware of what you're making them aware of.

Yeah, well thanks for having me on. Yeah, I feel like, I don't know, somehow I have the feeling that there's some essence to it that we didn't get to. But I don't know, I'll trust that maybe people picked up on the spirit of it.

Yeah, it's always the risk I take when I get somebody on to talk about a book that's like 500 pages long, that we won't necessarily cover the entire scope of what's in the book. But my goal again is to get people thinking about this and open them up to some of the concepts within. I think that we did just that.

Can I just say one thing that like the, like the, the key to the whole book is at the beginning where it says, everybody knows that life is a gift. We did not create the sun. We did not earn our mother taking care of us. We did not earn the ability of plants to grow. We did not earn soil. We did not earn water. None of these things came through our hard efforts, our breath, the functioning of our cells. All of this was a gift. Therefore, our native state is gratitude, which is the knowledge of having received and the desire to give in turn. Therefore, we have an unquenchable desire to give of our gifts, to make the world more beautiful, to make the world more whole. And if we are not doing that, then we'll feel like we're living the wrong life. It all comes from the core principle of life. And the world is a gift.

I love that. I remember that part of the book and it did speak a lot. I love the idea that I don't have to walk out of my front door in the morning and put some coins in a box for the sun to come up. It just happens. It's a gift. And a lot of our entire life cycle around us is indeed a gift. And I think that you cannot disentangle gratefulness and sacredness. I think that sums up the book really well. Man, I'm glad you actually threw that in. I fully agree. So the show notes for everybody listening, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com SacredEconomics Charles, thanks for coming on the show, man. Yep.

Thanks, Ben.

Alright, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Charles Eisenstein signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate, because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.