Aengus Anderson: You’re lis­ten­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion. I’m Aengus Anderson.

Micah Saul: I’m Micah Saul.

Neil Prendergast: And I’m Neil Prendergast. And if you’re just tun­ing into the series you may want to check out an ear­li­er episode, where we lay out the whole premise of The Conversation.

Saul: Yeah, these are our final episodes. They were all record­ed in 2013, and we’ve just been hor­rif­i­cal­ly lazy about get­ting them pack­aged up for you. But, they are now ready and here they are. 

Anderson: Today an inter­view with Charles Hugh Smith, an alter­na­tive eco­nom­ics blog­ger from the Bay Area.

Prendergast: The way we got to him, actu­al­ly, is that he was rec­om­mend­ed by a lis­ten­er, so it was real­ly nice to have that back and forth with our audience.

Anderson: He’s a real­ly inter­est­ing thinker. He’s self-taught. He’s got a back­ground in phi­los­o­phy, but he’s worked in a whole gamut of dif­fer­ent areas. But he’s been doing eco­nom­ics blog­ging because it is his pas­sion. CNBC list­ed him as one of their top alt eco­nom­ics blog­gers. So it was real­ly nice of him to carve out a lit­tle time and sit down for a con­ver­sa­tion. And speak­ing as the one who inter­viewed him, this was one of the most con­ver­sa­tion­al con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had. It nev­er felt like a sin­gle answer was boil­er­plate. And that is always refresh­ing. So, with­out fur­ther ado, here’s Charles Hugh Smith.

Charles Hugh Smith: We’re in an era of over­lap­ping crises, and I think that’s what makes it sort of unique. We’re aware of the finan­cial aspect, which is sort of expo­nen­tial increase in debt. We’re also aware that ener­gy, the cost is going up because we’re reach­ing to deep­er and more expen­sive reserves of ener­gy, at least fos­sil fuels. 

So that’s anoth­er if not cri­sis then um… Well, actu­al­ly it is a cri­sis, because the world we’ve con­struct­ed is based on cheap fos­sil fuels. And so any­thing that changes that cre­ates a chron­ic cri­sis. And I think con­sumerism as a way of life and as a guid­ing phi­los­o­phy for the finan­cial sec­tor and the econ­o­my as a whole, I think that has sort of run out of air, you know. That we’ve reached this sort of mar­gin­al return on con­sump­tion as the guid­ing phi­los­o­phy, not just for eco­nom­ic growth but for mean­ing in our lives. Like we iden­ti­fy who we are with the sig­ni­fiers that we’re able to pur­chase and consume. 

And then we can also look at say, just resources in gen­er­al. Not just ener­gy but soil, which is being deplet­ed. Fresh water which is under pres­sure. And cer­tain of the min­er­als. And so that’s the gen­er­al con­text of my work, is these four over­lap­ping crises.

Aengus Anderson: If the cur­rent sys­tems log­ic con­tin­ues, what does that look like?

Smith: We can sep­a­rate the finan­cial from the material.

Anderson: Okay.

Smith: So the finan­cial, there will be a cri­sis with­in I’d say ten years. Maybe you can stretch it out to you know, twelve years. But some­where rel­a­tive­ly soon, this whole thing of expo­nen­tial debt being built on an econ­o­my that’s basi­cal­ly flat­lined in the real world, that’s going to need to be reset. And the only way that it can be reset is all that debt’s liq­ui­dat­ed. It’s either destroyed by cri­sis or it’s for­giv­en, or it’s default­ed on. And so that’s guar­an­teed. That just math­e­mat­ics, and so that’s why guys like Chris Martenson who comes from a sci­en­tif­ic back­ground, they look at the math of debt at the gov­ern­ment and pri­vate sec­tor lev­els and they go, ​“This is…there’s no way this is sus­tain­able.” And so that’s one thing.

But that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean we all have to be like starv­ing in the streets, because the mate­r­i­al econ­o­my is still like, how much food is grown, how much ener­gy’s extract­ed, and how is it dis­trib­uted? That I think will part­ly depend on ener­gy. And a lot of peo­ple are now con­vinced that there’s going to be tons of fos­sil fuels for­ev­er because of the frack­ing and new tech­nolo­gies extract­ing more oil out of old wells and all that kind of thing. I look at that and go that’s all fine and good, and maybe even if you said it was infi­nite, if the cost is five times more than it is now, then that does­n’t work for the econ­o­my we have, which requires cheap energy.

Anderson: I was talk­ing to John Fullerton, are you famil­iar with him, of The Capital Institute?

Smith: Yes. A lit­tle bit.

Anderson: Okay. We were talk­ing about the sort of ter­ri­ble fork in the road that he feels we’re at. He said basi­cal­ly let’s not even wor­ry about ener­gy lim­its. Let’s say you’ve got all the ener­gy you want. But to burn it you still have to deal with the cli­mat­ic reper­cus­sions of that. So essen­tial­ly if you want to keep the cli­mate in an even remote­ly tol­er­a­ble zone for doing any­thing else in the world, farm­ing, or liv­ing, you basi­cal­ly have a lot of ener­gy that maybe exists in the ground but you just can’t burn. 

And then he was say­ing so, we can either go down the road where we say in advance, ​“Let’s not burn that,” and then you write off the val­ue of all of that. Which col­laps­es the val­ue of all these ener­gy com­pa­nies on the stock mar­ket and caus­es a sys­temic prob­lem that radi­ates out from that—with pan­ic and with poor dis­tri­b­u­tion based on just…pan­ic.

So that’s what you need to do to save the envi­ron­ment. And he said of course you could not save the envi­ron­ment. Let’s say you just burn all that stuff. And then you have a true envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem, with food dis­tri­b­u­tion issues that could lead to some sort of pan­ic that col­laps­es the stock mar­ket then pre­cip­i­tates a… And so he saw it as sort of this no-win sce­nario, but one of those ways real­ly hurts the phys­i­cal world that we live in, not only for us but for oth­er fea­tures as well. What do you think of that sce­nario? Are we in one of these…kinda lose-lose what­ev­er we do, with the cur­rent market?

Smith: The biol­o­gist E.O. Wilson, he wrote a book… I for­get the exact title but his think­ing is sim­i­lar. In life on plan­et Earth, a lot of peo­ple see the same kind of cone you’re describ­ing, where the num­ber of species that are being dri­ven to extinc­tion, and the dis­rup­tions of these ecosys­tems is just reach­ing a crit­i­cal phase based on burn­ing huge quan­ti­ties of coal, and of strip min­ing the ocean so there’s you know…totally dis­rupt­ing those ecolo­gies, and that you can’t go back and fix that stuff. You know, we can’t bring species back. We can’t bring the ocean ecol­o­gy back after we’ve elim­i­nat­ed all the whole food chain. So I think there is a point where you know, you can’t go back and fix that stuff with just more mon­ey. That’s kind of the intel­lec­tu­al par­a­digm we have, is, ​“Well, all you need is more mon­ey.” If you’re burn­ing too much coal then you spend mon­ey and put a scrub­ber on that chim­ney stack or what­ev­er. And so the idea that no amount of mon­ey can fix the prob­lems, that’s part of the…kind of the end of cap­i­tal­ism think­ing that I’m pur­su­ing, you know. That the whole mod­el is broken. 

Then I take your ques­tion as sort of like well, it’s an orga­ni­za­tion­al one. Is there some oth­er way that we could orga­nize life such that we could get by as a species on 10% of the ener­gy we now spend? And I think the answer’s well clear­ly, yes we could. So then it’s like, how do we orga­nize that rationally? 

Anderson: And do you buy his descrip­tion where we have that fork in the road with two options that lose, but one that takes out the envi­ron­ment? Or, is there a way to ignore that fork in the road entire­ly? Is there a third way that gets you to this min­i­mal ener­gy sce­nario with­out say, an eco­nom­ic col­lapse that leads to pan­ic? You know, because it seems like a big theme of this, is that every­thing is so inter­con­nect­ed that it does­n’t mat­ter what’s mate­ri­al­ly out there, right. There’s the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspect of if the mar­ket col­laps­es then dis­tri­b­u­tion breaks down. And that that kind of snow­balls, in a way.

Smith: Yeah. I agree with the domi­no sequence there. And I con­sid­er it a pos­i­tive if the finan­cial sit­u­a­tion col­laps­es. In oth­er words, if all of our finan­cial wealth van­ish­es, what impact does that actu­al­ly have? And if we fol­low that through it leads to some inter­est­ing ques­tions. Because most of us don’t con­trol enough wealth to real­ly make a dif­fer­ence. And so what we’re real­ly talk­ing about is the loss of all finan­cial wealth real­ly only affects the one tenth of 1% who own like 80% of the assets. And so if they were wiped out, how bad would that be for the rest of us? Well, it might be good.

Anderson: Mm hm. But would it lead to a dis­tri­b­u­tion prob­lem? A pan­ic that would affect every­one else? So, maybe they would lose a lot of wealth but in the process their com­pa­nies would stop func­tion­ing. You know, we have a very dis­trib­uted food sys­tem, for exam­ple, so if there was a finan­cial pan­ic and the top lost the wealth and their com­pa­nies fell into dis­ar­ray, would Walmart then be ship­ping pro­duce to all of these towns that aren’t ready to grow any­thing, and where the local pop­u­la­tion does­n’t have the knowl­edge to grow things? 

So that’s where I won­der, in the short term do you face a real cri­sis, even if it is in the long term a pos­i­tive thing? Because I’ve had sev­er­al peo­ple in the series—I’m think­ing of Jan Lundberg down in Santa Cruz, talk­ing about you know, cri­sis could be cathar­sis, you know, and lead to a bet­ter state. But I always won­der well what does that cri­sis look like, and how many peo­ple die just because of our own inef­fi­cien­cies and our own pan­ic mech­a­nism, our own herd mentality?

Smith: Yeah. And that’s um…that’s a ques­tion that’s real­ly hard to answer because there’s so many vari­ables. My sense is there’s a lot of peo­ple, and this is the pos­i­tive part, who are try­ing to set up par­al­lel sys­tems. Of course we’re still depen­dent on these large infra­struc­tures. You know, the Internet and the pow­er grid and all that. But to what­ev­er degree we can I think we need to cre­ate a par­al­lel sys­tem not only of val­ues but of ways of using the ener­gy and the infra­struc­ture, that if we can dis­tance our­selves from these car­tels, the more the bet­ter. So if they sur­vive, they’re not going to impact us so much. And if they crum­ble, or devolve, then we’ve sep­a­rat­ed our­selves out. 

And so that’s the whole idea of the relo­cal­iz­ing econ­o­my, that you can say, ​“Well you know, the farm­ers mar­ket can’t replace Walmart. But can it replace the fresh fruits and veg­eta­bles that Walmart does­n’t have, or that it only has a selec­tion, or that Walmart flew in those grapes 6,000 miles from Chile? Can it replace some part of that?” And so the more that we can replace the bet­ter, that’s how I would kind of phrase it.

Some com­mu­ni­ties are going to do bet­ter than oth­ers, because they’ve built a lit­tle bit of resilience. That would be hope­ful in the sense that there’s a mod­el that oth­er peo­ple can quick­ly fol­low, and because of the Internet we now have a way to spread that kind of knowl­edge extreme­ly quickly. 

You go, ​“Well wait a minute. You’re talk­ing about like the real world. Can gar­den­ing spread that fast? Can Zipcar spread that fast?” And I’m say­ing I think in terms of social inno­va­tion yes it can. It can spread as fast as tech­nol­o­gy, because it’s enabled by tech­nol­o­gy. And so I’m a lit­tle more hope­ful that par­al­lel sys­tems can arise as these cen­tral­ized sys­tems decay or devolve. 

So I have one foot in that camp, that rec­og­nizes the pow­er of the local econ­o­my and the real world. And then I also have a foot in the camp of gee, this 3D print­er is going to wipe out a bunch of car­tels because we don’t need these 6,000-mile sup­ply chains to China any­more because you can buy like a desk­top 3D print­er for three grand or some­thing. And if you put that in a com­mu­ni­ty work­shop where a bunch of peo­ple can rent it for like ten bucks an hour, sud­den­ly you have like a nexus of poten­tial inno­va­tion, with­out a 6,000-mile sup­ply chain con­trolled by a cen­tral­ized cor­po­ra­tion con­trolled by a cen­tral state. 

Anderson: Kind of the big thrust in terms of what you’d want to see hap­pen­ing now would be local, par­al­lel, resilient, small-scale systems.

Smith: Yeah. And why would that be some­thing we want to do? Well, two rea­sons. One is it’s more fun and it feels bet­ter. With the caveat that we can actu­al­ly sup­port that this is a health­i­er envi­ron­ment with data. Just like there’s end­less reams of data to sup­port the Mediterranean diet as like the key to longevi­ty, and the com­mu­ni­ty that goes with that kind of lifestyle is part of that longevi­ty. That’s been stud­ied to death and it’s sup­port­ed by data. 

But then there’s also that the tech­no­log­i­cal or eco­nom­ic argu­ment is the 3D desk­top fab tech­nol­o­gy enables faster bet­ter cheap­er, at least in cer­tain areas. And so in those areas it’s actu­al­ly more effi­cient and cheap­er than Walmart.

Anderson: With 7 bil­lion peo­ple on the plan­et, could you have any oth­er kind of mod­el? You know, when I think of soci­eties where peo­ple had a much more direct, vest­ed con­nec­tion to the com­mu­ni­ty, it seems like they were small and prim­i­tive, in a way that…well,we don’t know how to be small with 7 bil­lion peo­ple, and we don’t want to be prim­i­tive, right?

Smith: Yeah, and this is where it’s real­ly inter­est­ing to con­sid­er Tainter’s view of com­plex­i­ty and maybe tease apart the parts of our lives that are com­plex? And so, if you say…let’s take the whole Internet. It’s very com­plex in all of its work­ings. But in terms of its ener­gy con­sump­tion, it’s about 2% of ener­gy use, I think. All the servers, the whole deal. That’s still a con­sid­er­able amount of elec­tric­i­ty. But it’s a tiny per­cent­age of the elec­tric­i­ty com­pared to air trav­el, trans­porta­tion, heat­ing and cool­ing you know mil­lions of build­ings. And so we could say, is is sus­tain­able to main­tain the Internet com­plex­i­ty? And on just a straight ener­gy lev­el, you’d have to say yes. 

And then you say well, what about all the com­plex­i­ty that the Internet gen­er­ates or enables? And then you go well, if it’s not an ener­gy drain, there’s real­ly no mate­r­i­al rea­son why that’s not sus­tain­able. And so the com­plex­i­ty that seems unsus­tain­able to me is the mar­gin­al return kind of thing. And you know, there’s lots of exam­ples of that. Flying in grapes from coun­try 6,000 miles away. Is that real­ly wise? What if we just chose to eat some oth­er fruit or veg­etable that was local? 

Anderson: This makes me think of when I was talk­ing to David Korten, he was out­lin­ing this big eco­nom­ic prob­lem. And I was say­ing okay, well what do you do about it? And he said, ​“You reduce waste.” You can have access to all these things that give you qual­i­ta­tive rich­ness, say through the Internet, all that infor­ma­tion. And yet you can mas­sive­ly reduce. You can get rid of the car. You know, you don’t have to live in the suburb. 

And of course what I always want to know about some­thing like that, and this was a ques­tion I was talk­ing about with my co-host after­wards is, to have that lit­tle con­nec­tion to the Internet, can that exist at all with­out the giant high-energy frame­work else­where, you know?

Smith: One of my friends is Jim Kunstler, the author of The Long Emergency, and his view is we’re going to go back to a world made by hand. In oth­er words were going to lose all this tech­no­log­i­cal com­plex­i­ty because of the same dynam­ic you just described. It requires this gigan­tic struc­ture. And if you lose the huge indus­tri­al struc­ture then you lose the technology. 

I’m not so sure, per­son­al­ly, because of the like, dig­i­tal fab rev­o­lu­tion, the so-called desk­top 3D print­ing and so on. It could be that a lot of the parts to the tech­nol­o­gy will be able to be designed and man­u­fac­tured on a very small scale. And then that would open up a lot of doors to keep­ing all this elec­tron­ic tech­nol­o­gy affordable.

Anderson: The hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion I talk about my co-hosts will be like, you want to make some­thing like this record­ing device that we’re using here. It’s a sol­id state recorder and it’s full of inte­grat­ed cir­cuits. It’s full of exot­ic rare earths that come from all over the world. Does dig­i­tal fab­ri­ca­tion allow you to make this in a local way?

Smith: Yeah, I think there’s a bit of sleight of hand there that like the actu­al ICs—the inte­grat­ed circuits—they’re made in like these enor­mous fabs that cost like $2 billion.

Anderson: Right, and there’s no way to real­ly quite fake that.

Smith: No, there isn’t. In an ide­al­ized sys­tem? then you’d have a fab…like and IC fab like that locat­ed next to a big hydro­elec­tric dam, or some sort of ener­gy source that was­n’t like coal-fired or what­ev­er. Because that fab uses a lot of pow­er, but it gen­er­ates tens of mil­lions of chips at an incred­i­bly low cost. And so that’s some­thing that you’d say well, look at the enabling pow­er of those lit­tle ten-cent chips glob­al­ly. If we need­ed a bil­lion chips, or 10 bil­lion chips, how much would this cost us in terms of ener­gy con­sump­tion, and it would again be some­thing like 1% or less.

Anderson: So I think you’ve made a com­pelling argu­ment that you could prob­a­bly keep a lot of the good­ies in a very effi­cient system—at least the elec­tron­ic good­ies. Maybe the com­plex good­ies. But maybe not the heavy indus­tri­al good­ies like the car.

Smith: One of the oth­er themes I con­stant­ly write about is social inno­va­tion. One of the things that authors like Jim Kunstler focus on is most peo­ple look to tech­nol­o­gy to solve all prob­lems through what he calls mag­ic. In oth­er words we don’t real­ly under­stand how it’s all going to work, but we’re going to get hydro­gen and unlim­it­ed sup­plies from the ocean, and they’re going to like, dig down two miles and get to some sol­id methane and do some mirac­u­lous thing to it. 

And of course, the more you know about the actu­al tech­nolo­gies of ener­gy the more amazed you are that it’s as cheap as it is. Because I mean, drilling a hole like 10,000 feet deep and then frack­ing it and then extract­ing this stuff and then tak­ing it to this gigan­tic refin­ery, it’s so immense and cost­ly it’s a mir­a­cle that we even have any gaso­line at less than 100 bucks a gallon. 

And so that kind of mag­ic I don’t believe in. But on the oth­er hand desk­top 3D, it is a sort of mag­ic. And so I think we have to kind of sep­a­rate out the mag­ic from the tech­nol­o­gy that can be local­ized and could actu­al­ly be cost effective. 

And then social inno­va­tion does­n’t require any mon­ey at all. For instance, there’s like Zipcar and share rides, that’s one vehi­cle that’s shared by maybe five peo­ple or even ten peo­ple. So let’s say that you had one vehi­cle and you had a much more effi­cient sys­tem than we have with Zipcar. Then [we’ve] basi­cal­ly elim­i­nat­ed 90% of the autos through a social inno­va­tion that’s enabled by the Internet.

Anderson: It’s inter­est­ing because we’re deal­ing with this lega­cy of sub­urbs here, right—

Smith: Yes.

Anderson: —where all these peo­ple live in places where there’s going to be a drag if you want to shift away from that. You’re going to have to rebuild city cen­ters so there are walk­a­ble areas.

Smith: Yeah. I men­tioned Jim Kunstler because he basi­cal­ly start­ed from that per­spec­tive of look­ing crit­i­cal­ly at sub­urbs and then fol­low­ing up on the con­se­quences of that fixed invest­ment. And so he feels that we’re trapped between the sunk cost, it’s called, like we’ve invest­ed so much in this infra­struc­ture of inter­state high­ways and sub­urbs that we can’t let go of it. And yet it’s cost­ing us more and more ener­gy and time for less and less yield.

Anderson: Mm hm.

Smith: Yeah, and that’s also Joseph Tainter’s analy­sis, is that the return on all this invest­ment just gets small­er and small­er. And then you reach a thresh­old where it implodes. Then you start won­der­ing well what are the con­se­quences of that, and one avenue of thought is the sub­urbs become the new ghettos. 

Anderson: Let’s just say, in a hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nario, we got rid of a lot of the waste. Even if you do that, we’re still faced with a sce­nario where we have an eco­nom­ic mod­el that real­ly only knows how to grow. Even if the rate of rise is much slow­er with an effi­cient econ­o­my is it still always going to increase the mate­r­i­al foot­print anyway?

Smith: Yeah, I think that’s…I think you’ve iden­ti­fied sort of the nub of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, which is based on there’s always got to be more. More mate­r­i­al wealth, more finan­cial wealth that can be dis­trib­uted to more and more peo­ple. And so Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called The End of Work a few years ago. And the thrust of his think­ing was tech­nol­o­gy is reduc­ing the need for human labor to such a degree that paid work is no longer going to be a sys­tem we can count on to dis­trib­ute the essen­tials of life. I think we see that more and more as the abil­i­ty of soft­ware automa­tion, robot­ics, keeps advanc­ing up the food chain from low-skill labor to higher-skill labor. And so then we face a cri­sis per­haps less of mate­r­i­al wealth or exploita­tion of resources, to we just don’t have enough pay­ing work any­more to sup­port this sort of consumption.

And so then we go well what’s beyond paid work? And then you go well, in my mind we have to go back to a community-based thing where you can have a good life but you have very lit­tle expo­sure to the finan­cial econ­o­my. You don’t need debt. You’re not mak­ing enough to bor­row mon­ey but you don’t need to because there’s a new sys­tem of exchange that takes a sur­plus that the econ­o­my gen­er­ates and dis­trib­utes it to the com­mu­ni­ty, based less on the mar­ket val­ue of your labor and more on what you’re con­tribut­ing to the com­mu­ni­ty locally. 

Anderson: But is there enough of a demand for that, at the end of the day? Are there enough jobs or do we just have so many damn peo­ple that they can’t all be work­ing at soup kitchens and being fund­ed by their friends’ dona­tions in the com­mu­ni­ty, liv­ing a very ascetic lifestyle? Are we just deal­ing with a giant num­bers problem?

Smith: My sense is there’s a ton of undone work, but that there’s only two sources of fund­ing for it in our cur­rent sys­tem. Either the gov­ern­ment bor­rows the mon­ey by sell­ing trea­sury bonds or local munic­i­pal bonds. Or it skims the mon­ey from some pri­vate sec­tor enter­prise, or indi­vid­ual with tax­es. Or, the mar­ket econ­o­my iden­ti­fies some prof­it in this thing that will gen­er­ate enough mon­ey that they can pay peo­ple to do it.

And so I think of things like well what about a bike lane or a bike­way? Now, we all know that bikes are good, and that they are health­i­er, and they reduce pol­lu­tion, and they also are good for the urban econ­o­my. You know, like, peo­ple on their bikes will stop and go to local busi­ness­es that they hap­pen to see because they’re able to do so, they’re on their bike and so on. And so there’s this mul­ti­pli­er effect that’s been shown with hav­ing bike lanes and bike­ways that are safe.

I don’t want to sound too fanat­i­cal about it because there’s a lot of com­mu­ni­ties where bik­ing does­n’t work because the weath­er’s extreme or the dis­tances are too great. But I men­tion bike­ways because there’s so many ben­e­fits to them, but our sys­tem does­n’t pro­vide any way to cost that. The gov­ern­ment does­n’t count cars that are not on the road because some­body’s rid­ing a bike. They don’t mea­sure the health improve­ments from rid­ing a bike. We only mea­sure how much mon­ey we’re blow­ing on peo­ple that had a heart attack, not the peo­ple that were saved from hav­ing a heart attack because they’ve been rid­ing a bike for 10 years. 

So there’s no ben­e­fit to the gov­ern­ment or the mar­ket econ­o­my to cre­at­ing a bike lane. It’s like, well who’s going to pay for it? There’s no prof­it in this. And there’s no polit­i­cal demand strong enough. And so I look at this as a clas­sic mod­el where the com­mu­ni­ty would then look at the val­ue of a bike lane, and they would take resources that had been made avail­able from the sur­plus gen­er­at­ed else­where. Maybe it’s by tax­es, maybe it’s by dona­tions. And then the com­mu­ni­ty gets to decide how to spend the mon­ey, with­out regard to prof­it or lobbying.

Anderson: And so do you think that’s some­thing that could be done in say, a more…a lower-production economy?

Smith: Yeah.

Anderson: Yeah, because in this case you’d deploy a bunch of peo­ple out to make the bike lane—

Smith: Yes.

Anderson: But, you know, now we of course think well, we’ve got pro­fes­sion­als who know how to [pave roads, you’ve got da da da da da da. But if we have on an econ­o­my that’s sort of moved beyond a lot of the tra­di­tion­al employ­ment roles that we have, do you have a bunch of peo­ple who just kind of vol­un­teer to dif­fer­ent caus­es and can’t real­ly put in a bike lane? To some extent do you need a real­ly spe­cial­ized, strat­i­fied econ­o­my to be able to achieve some­thing like paving a road, which seems like a very tech­ni­cal job that maybe could­n’t be done in the sort of local craftsper­son way?

Smith: Yeah, I think you’ve raised a very impor­tant issue that I often write about too, which is prepar­ing our­selves for like a new mode of work which I call ​“hybrid work.” Like maybe acquir­ing skills across a spec­trum of things as opposed to the spe­cial­iza­tion, which we all know that’s kind of the mod­el that we’ve been fol­low­ing for decades, which is the more spe­cial­ized your skills then the high­er val­ue your labor has. And of course, in terms of being a sur­geon or a pilot we under­stand that these are high-value posi­tions because there’s very few peo­ple who qual­i­fy. But the num­ber of peo­ple that are in that role might be 5 or 10% of the econ­o­my, and the oth­er 9% of us are gen­er­al­ized, or our skillset’s not quite that unique or dif­fi­cult to reach.

So, kind of to go back to the point, I’ll men­tion the exam­ple from the UK, from Britain, where a lot of local gov­ern­ments are find­ing they don’t have enough mon­ey to fund every­thing they want to, just like here. And so when at least one town in Britain, they’ve come up with a solu­tion where there’s one paid city work­er who dri­ves the truck with the asphalt to fill pot­holes. And then there’s vol­un­teers who then he teach­es or leads. And so then the pothole-filling crew is one paid guy and like five vol­un­teers. And of course you go well, how are the five peo­ple paid? And of course in Britain it’s a wel­fare state so they’re get­ting some sort of social benefits. 

And what I’m kind of propos­ing as an alter­na­tive is the com­mu­ni­ty would get what­ev­er mon­ey we now devote to social ser­vices rather than the indi­vid­ual, so that peo­ple would have a chance to con­tribute rather than just get­ting a check in the mail and then sit­ting down and watch­ing TV and feel­ing depressed about their lack of mean­ing in their life. The only way that you could get hous­ing and food and all the stuff that social ser­vices pro­vide is you would have to con­tribute to the com­mu­ni­ty. And I think the key word here I think is reci­procity, and that’s what we’ve lost. We only know about the reci­procity of mon­ey. In oth­er words, I pro­vide my labor to you and you pay me. And then I go out and I do some more finan­cial trades. But in terms of like my involve­ment in the com­mu­ni­ty we’ve lost that reciprocity.

Anderson: I think some­thing that comes to mind for me is always that if you’ve got that say, par­al­lel to a mar­ket econ­o­my, it seems like you might have peo­ple who are play­ing this big­ger finan­cial game always able to sort of…ooze in and coopt and cor­rupt those local systems.

Smith: Yeah. You’ve brought up a crit­i­cal ques­tion about this iter­a­tion of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism we’re in. And if you take say, thinkers like Wallerstein, his idea was the tele­ol­o­gy of cap­i­tal­ism is always expand­ing your asset base, which is what you just spoke to. And so, with­in that tele­ol­o­gy, if there’s some way to mon­e­tize or prof­it from some­thing that’s out­side the exist­ing finan­cial sys­tem, then those prof­it cen­ters will attempt to take it over. 

But the ques­tion that that world sys­tems approach rais­es is, what if we’re at the end of this iter­a­tion of cap­i­tal­ism? Because this iter­a­tion of cap­i­tal­ism only works if there’s enough peo­ple that can earn enough mon­ey from their wage labor to sup­port what I call the finan­cial­ized economy—like in oth­er words it’s all based on debt, you know. You want to have a house, roof over your head? Big debt. You want to go to col­lege? Oh, here’s anoth­er giant amount of debt. You want to have a vehi­cle? Oh! More debt. So real­ly it’s sort of like, what would we have if debt was elim­i­nat­ed? Well you’d elim­i­nate this iter­a­tion of glob­al capitalism.

Anderson: So you think there could be anoth­er form of cap­i­tal­ism that would­n’t be based on per­pet­u­al growth?

Smith: Yeah. I think it’s pos­si­ble or that it would be much more freeform and anar­chis­tic. There might be high growth in one area and like, sta­ble or slow growth or even decay­ing sit­u­a­tions else­where but that we’d have a local­ized and per­haps more frag­ment­ed sit­u­a­tion. I’m strug­gling here to describe some­thing that I see, that the Internet allows for all these con­nec­tions at a high­er lev­el. We can be more like a bee­hive. In oth­er words, where the bees have a sys­tem for com­mu­ni­cat­ing and orga­niz­ing their labor which appears chaot­ic and ran­dom but is actu­al­ly high­ly effi­cient. And it’s…this thing with­in sys­tems analy­sis, it’s called self-organizing sys­tems, where each indi­vid­ual unit (in this case for exam­ple a bee), does not have a tremen­dous amount of intel­li­gence. It has a tiny brain, it has very few ways of feed­ing back infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with oth­er fees, But nonethe­less, it cre­ates an immense­ly com­plex sys­tem from real­ly small pieces. And so I think a lot of peo­ple see the poten­tial in that as being the basis for a new glob­al capitalism.

Anderson: It seems like there’s a real ques­tion of human nature here which I find very inter­est­ing. You know, with the be anal­o­gy, are we bees? Can we self-organize in that way or are we a hier­ar­chi­cal ani­mal that nat­u­ral­ly self-organizes in ways that are very…pyramid-like. Do we seek the sim­plic­i­ty of the hier­ar­chy, rather than the chaos of the emer­gent or self-organizing system?

Smith: Yeah, that’s a fas­ci­nat­ing ques­tion and I think like a lot of things in human nature, I guess you can say yes to both? If we look at our pri­mate cousins, we can say that chim­panzees are extreme­ly hier­ar­chi­cal, and bru­tal­ly so in enforc­ing the hier­ar­chy. And yet we also have the orang­utans and oth­er pri­mate cousins who are indi­vid­ual, who are iso­lat­ed. Typically they don’t form groups that much. And so you say well gosh, we seem to have both of those char­ac­ter­is­tics. Is it cre­at­ing a bal­ance between those? 

And you go well, what’s the bal­ance in a cen­tral­ized sys­tem? And what I see is the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is an excel­lent exam­ple of a sys­tem with increas­ing­ly dimin­ish­ing returns on its cen­tral­iza­tion. Like it sucks up more and more of the resources, and it pro­vides less and less, real­ly. In its ini­tial growth phase, say in the 20^th cen­tu­ry, cen­tral­iza­tion as a whole paid all these div­i­dends, you know. That the larg­er the com­pa­ny or the gov­ern­ment got, then the more effi­cient it could [be]come. It’s like, they call it the effi­cien­cies of scale, you know, and the idea that that’s an end­less process is per­haps just flat-out wrong. And that actu­al­ly maybe we’ve reached a point where we’ve topped out on the effi­cien­cies and now it’s actu­al­ly cost­ing us the more we centralize. 

Democracy’s not becom­ing more demo­c­ra­t­ic as a result, it’s actu­al­ly we’re get­ting a less demo­c­ra­t­ic nation as a result. And the econ­o­my is becom­ing more frag­ile from this cen­tral­iza­tion into the Federal Reserve and the exec­u­tive branch. So we’re get­ting actu­al­ly a neg­a­tive yield on more cen­tral­iza­tion, so then it would be nat­ur­al to say well then we need to try the new mod­el beyond this. The next tele­ol­o­gy will be decen­tral­iza­tion because it’s sim­ply way more efficient.

Anderson: Part of the premise of this project is look­ing at dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal moments where it seems like a social sys­tem has ceased work­ing and there are a lot of peo­ple in the cul­ture talk­ing about, ​“Well what do we do next?” and all these crazy ideas are on the table. But of course what I won­der is, does that lead the change, proac­tive­ly? Or does that hap­pen after the change is already under­way? Are we, as Joseph Tainter said, only respon­sive to the price mechanism?

Smith: Yeah. I think you’ve iden­ti­fied real­ly the key ques­tion of the era. Like say if we go back to the print­ed word, the Gutenberg press and the sud­den explo­sion of tech­nol­o­gy which we con­sid­er sort of prim­i­tive like oh my gosh, you make paper and you print it… But that explo­sion of knowl­edge cre­at­ed immense changes because an aver­age per­son could now have access to a scale of knowl­edge that was only attain­able to a hand­ful of schol­ars a few decades before. Maybe what we’re real­ly ask­ing is, can we take the kind of tech­no­log­i­cal change that we’re used to…transforming the world lit­er­al­ly in a decade, can we extrap­o­late that to social inno­va­tions? Or are those unat­tain­able, or are those in some oth­er scale that we can’t real­ly apply the tech­nol­o­gy model? 

And I’m a lit­tle more hope­ful, I guess, that the tech­nol­o­gy mod­el is the social inno­va­tion mod­el. Because the tech­nol­o­gy rev­o­lu­tion of the Internet has enabled the spread of all these ideas that can be applied. They’re practical.

Anderson: Though with some­thing like tech­nol­o­gy, you know, you could’ve giv­en me a new com­put­er in the mid-90s with an Internet con­nec­tion and I would’ve gone, ​“Oh, well this is excit­ing. It opens up all these doors, but it does­n’t demand sac­ri­fice,” right. I mean sac­ri­fice in terms of learn­ing it, a lit­tle time sacrificed. 

But it seems like this would be like you’re propos­ing well, here’s a sys­tem that…that may be hurtling towards destruc­tion but does­n’t seem that way, to most peo­ple who are look­ing at it. They’re just not read­ing those sources, they’re not look­ing at the same things that you’re look­ing at or that oth­er peo­ple are look­ing at. And so what you’d be ask­ing of them almost is like, ​“Make this big sac­ri­fice so this thing does­n’t dri­ve off a cliff, even though you think it’s not dri­ving off a cliff.” So it seems like there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent between adapt­ing to a new tech­nol­o­gy and adapt­ing pre­emp­tive­ly to a new social model.

Smith: Yeah. I think you’re right, and I think you’re rais­ing a point that goes back to human nature, which at least from my point of view and my own per­son­al expe­ri­ences none of us change until we have to. As you men­tioned that Tainter men­tioned, peo­ple find an amaz­ing abil­i­ty to inno­vate and to adapt when the price of some­thing like, goes up ten-fold. They sud­den­ly find some way around that. And so then we’re real­ly ask­ing, is that process going to be so dis­rup­tive that we’re going to lose the system.

Anderson: Right.

Smith: I tend to look at the mate­r­i­al cul­ture and say if it’s extreme­ly frag­ile, that cul­ture, that soci­ety, that econ­o­my could be in real big trou­ble. I would think the next ten years are are real­ly going to be extreme­ly inter­est­ing. There’s gonna be resets of sys­tems, and whether it’s going to be messy or not, it’s total­ly up in the air.

Anderson: I’m think­ing of my con­ver­sa­tion with the philoso­pher Lawrence Torcello, and I said, ​“What’s the cri­sis of the present?” He said, ​“It’s stu­pid­i­ty.” And you know, so when we think about stu­pid­i­ty and hav­ing to like deal with these resets…and how do we do that?, do we have the matu­ri­ty to do that?, there’s a real­ly inter­est­ing ques­tion there in terms of like how do we even per­ceive real­i­ty? Because edu­ca­tion plays such a role in like what data we choose to take in. The com­plex­i­ty of sys­tems that we can see.

Smith: Well when we talk about stu­pid­i­ty, my favorite exam­ple of that as a sort of a joke about it is The Onion had a par­o­dy where it said only six­teen peo­ple in the US qual­i­fy to dri­ve their cars. And if you were entire­ly strict about your…

Anderson: Right.

Smith: That would be true!

Anderson: Yeah.

Smith: That, why do we allow 200 mil­lion peo­ple this free­dom to kill oth­er people?

Anderson: Then when we’re talk­ing about you know, you hit this cri­sis moment and we’re allow­ing them to vote…

Smith: Yeah, exactly. 

Anderson: And I think Torcello’s thrust was like, boy we sure need to work on edu­ca­tion first so we extend the term that peo­ple are think­ing in. And actu­al­ly I think that was the only bit of opti­mism in my con­ver­sa­tion with Joseph Tainter. And he does­n’t think it’ll make any dif­fer­ence but he thinks you have to try with edu­ca­tion first, to extend peo­ple’s time­frames so they’re at least cog­nizant of the crises that they’re cre­at­ing and deal­ing with.

Smith: And then we come into the bio­log­i­cal lim­its. Is that just an intel­lec­tu­al con­cept or can we start chang­ing our behav­ior for that? And then that’s when the ​“price is every­thing” guys tend to come in and they tend to win that argu­ment because peo­ple talk about dif­fer­ent things about their val­ue sys­tem but they actu­al­ly only respond gen­er­al­ly to price. 

But it also rais­es this notion of…that Douglas Rushkoff wrote in his lat­est book, it’s called Present Shock.

Anderson: Mm hm.

Smith: And he’s refer­ring to the 1970 book Future Shock, which was a big deal way before you were born. And that what the idea behind Future Shock was, the world is chang­ing so rapid­ly that it’s exceed­ed our bio­log­i­cal abil­i­ty to process this rapid change and make sense of it and adapt to it. And so then we basi­cal­ly enter a stage of being over­whelmed and inca­pable of pro­cess­ing every­thing. And so Rushkoff, and prob­a­bly many oth­er peo­ple, have con­clud­ed we’ve reached that point now.

Anderson: Right.

Smith: That the Internet has speed­ed up so much the input that we’re receiv­ing that we lit­er­al­ly have lost the abil­i­ty to track a nar­ra­tive. And that our sense of time has now been com­pressed. Everything hap­pens in the present.

Anderson: Mm hm.

Smith: That’s real­ly destruc­tive, obvi­ous­ly, to the thing we’re talk­ing about, which is we need a longer-term point of view here.

Anderson: Right, and what’s inter­est­ing you know, when I talked to Rushkoff and I was try­ing to ask him like, ​“Where are you going with this? What kind of future do you want?” he was so into the present shock thing that he said like, ​“I’m not even con­cerned about that. I’m con­cerned about what we can do right now,” in a way that real­ly resem­bles stuff that we’ve been talk­ing about, you know. Not as orga­nized, but he was just say­ing you know, have din­ner with your neigh­bor. Pull out of the big sys­tem as much as you can in a way that makes me think now as you’re talk­ing about resilience like ah, there’s a res­o­nance there, you know. Rushkoff was say­ing, can you knit some­thing at home? Okay, well that’s not every­thing but start there. Very prag­mat­ic, and maybe not…it might seem remark­ably unambi­tious to a lot of peo­ple. But I think he feels that we’re so stuck in this present shock that ask­ing for any more than that is just ask­ing too much.

Smith: This rais­es anoth­er issue which I think about a lot because I’m 59 and so yes, I’m a Baby Boomer and so yes, I’m to blame for all these prob­lems. Certainly my gen­er­a­tion has a lot to answer for; I will be the first to say that. Having lived through, as a child, the 60s and the ear­ly 70s, I think that that era is inter­est­ing. There was kind of a counter-revolution or a ref­or­ma­tion of the whole con­sumerist men­tal­i­ty that we now call the coun­ter­cul­ture. And it’s often derid­ed or mar­gin­al­ized now because the Baby Boom Generation quick­ly dropped that and bought back into the con­sumerist men­tal­i­ty with total vigor. 

But I think that it shows that you can have a social rev­o­lu­tion that has an eco­nom­ic and a reli­gious aspect. I mean like, in oth­er words Christianity changed in the 60s as well, with the Jesus freak move­ment and a lot of growth of mar­gin­al church­es and explo­ration of Eastern think­ing and try­ing to inte­grate that into Christianity. And so the pos­si­bil­i­ty of broad spec­trum change, just the last fifty years, proves it is pos­si­ble. And we could look at 1968 in terms of like Paris and Czechoslovakia, and—

Anderson: Right.

Smith: It’s not just a US phe­nom­e­non is what I’m say­ing. Or in a neg­a­tive exam­ple the Cultural Revolution in China. You can have this broad spec­trum change that touch­es on all these dif­fer­ent things. And again it’s not a cen­tral­ized idea or a cen­tral­ized author­i­ty cre­ates it.

Anderson: If we were to call that The Conversation, which is some­thing that we do peri­od­i­cal­ly in here, that cer­tain­ly seems like the last one we had, you know. And where did that come from?

Smith: I mean, some peo­ple say, and I think you could make the case, that it was all about the dis­cov­ery of new super­giant oil fields in the North Sea and Alaska and West Africa. And that every­thing that had a momen­tum for chang­ing the kind of con­sumerist ver­sion of cap­i­tal­ism tele­ol­o­gy van­ished in a flood of cheap oil. If we are no longer find­ing these kind of gigan­tic new sources of cheap ener­gy, maybe the ground will become fer­tile again for a social rev­o­lu­tion, or every­thing’s on the table again.

Anderson: That’s a real­ly inter­est­ing way of putting it because you know, some­thing I’ve been think­ing about as we’ve been talk­ing is kind of eco­nom­ic deter­min­ism. How much of us is just a reac­tive ani­mal deal­ing with scarci­ty and sup­ply. You know.

Smith: Yes.

Anderson: And all of this philo­soph­i­cal stuff is just…it’s just the wrap­ping paper we put on it to give our­selves a sense of dig­ni­ty, you know? 

Smith: [laugh­ing] Yes.

Anderson: Maybe that descrip­tion can bridge this a lit­tle bet­ter, where you can say well okay so yes, we’re reac­tive to all of these eco­nom­ic forces. But, when they’re scarce, then there’s a place for this con­ver­sa­tion and the social stuff and indi­vid­ual agency and lead­er­ship and all of those things to real­ly play a role in decid­ing how you deal with it. Maybe if there’s unlim­it­ed wealth, then maybe we do act in real­ly pre­dictable and self­ish and shal­low ways. But maybe when there’s lim­it­ed wealth, then you get a lit­tle more variety.

Smith: I had­n’t real­ly thought about it in the way you just described but I think you’ve nailed a key dynam­ic of our era, is that when there’s immense sur­plus the deci­sion­mak­ing can be real­ly loose because there’s so much wealth we can afford that slop­py deci­sion­mak­ing. And so what you’re say­ing is it becomes we only have to start think­ing clear­ly in scarci­ty. And I think that’s a very pow­er­ful dynamic. 

So I think we’re going to expe­ri­ence that time that we’re talk­ing about, when scarci­ty occurs, in the next decade, where deci­sion­mak­ing will have to real­ly sharp­en up. I kin­da go back to the Pareto Principle that the 4%, the vital few, influ­ence the 64 and then the 80%. And so—

Anderson: But that’s got to be after our crisis.

Smith: Well actu­al­ly I think it’s actu­al­ly got to be before, because what you’re doing, and all the peo­ple that you talk to— And I don’t try to put myself in some sort of like…that I’ve got the answers. But what we’re doing is we’re talk­ing about things, and some of the peo­ple you have talked to I con­sid­er part of the 4% who are lay­ing out all these alter­na­tives and dif­fer­ent ways of think­ing and approach­ing things, and that those will catch on like fire. When the time is right, and when peo­ple are look­ing for alter­na­tives they’ll already be there. If we did­n’t talk about it, and if you did­n’t do your work, and the rest of us did­n’t do our work, then we real­ly would be in a tight spot because we would­n’t have any alter­na­tives already laid out.

Anderson: So as we look towards this dif­fer­ent par­a­digm, are you opti­mistic that the things that you hope to see will happen?

Smith: I’m opti­mistic because of the vast explo­sion of knowl­edge and shar­ing of knowl­edge and mod­els because of the Internet. And that puts one of my feet in the ​“tech­nol­o­gy is going to save us” mag­ic camp, but I don’t real­ly think of myself as being in that camp for the sim­ple rea­son is I see it as an exten­sion of the print­ing press rev­o­lu­tion. In oth­er words all you’re real­ly doing is enabling the aver­age per­son to access far more knowl­edge and skills than they could have otherwise. 

Anderson: It seems like ulti­mate­ly your faith is in knowl­edge, and the free­dom to use it.

Smith: I think that sum­ma­rizes my view­point very well. Better than I could myself.

Anderson: So there we have an inter­view that is really…non-dogmatic, very prag­mat­ic. One of the things that I real­ly liked about this is it felt like we got to fol­low trains of thought for a while. There’ve been a lot of inter­views where peo­ple say, ​“Here’s an exam­ple of a mag­ic tech­nol­o­gy.” And I go, ​“Okay,” maybe I ask one or two follow-up ques­tions, maybe I don’t have time for it. 

But in this case, Charles said, ​“Okay, fab­ri­ca­tors.” And I said, ​“Well, alright. But do they make this real­ly com­pli­cat­ed form of elec­tron­ics equip­ment?” which is some­thing that I always won­der, right? You can’t say ​“fab­ri­ca­tor is a panacea” and then just let it…go.

And he said, ​“Well. Okay. Here’s some ways in which that could still be pro­duced, and here are some oth­er things that could­n’t be pro­duced by that. And oh by the way, here’s a way it could be scaled,” and maybe it felt like we got a lit­tle bit lost in detail? But part of me did­n’t edit that because I want­ed to show that we went down those roads.

Prendergast: It actu­al­ly real­ly kind of inspired me, and I like that he con­nect­ed his ideas to a lot of works that actu­al­ly I’m kind of inter­est­ed in myself. End of work, James Howard Kunstler’s book, Present Shock also, Rushkoff. Really inter­est­ing stuff. And kind of what I want­ed to see was more of those par­tic­u­lar­i­ties, actu­al­ly. A lit­tle bit maybe beyond the eco­nom­ics, and—

Anderson: Wait, you want­ed to get lost in the weeds more?

Prendergast: Yeah, I did, actu­al­ly. But I mean I think that just says that I was on board with his big pic­ture. And what I kind of want­ed was some of the more pol­i­cy stuff. Talking about the bike lanes, the com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens, the farm­ers mar­kets kind of thing. Those things have kin­da tak­en off around the coun­try right now. But I think there’s just so much more that small com­mu­ni­ties need to do to kind of cre­ate those par­al­lel sys­tems. But I think a lot of peo­ple are won­der­ing well, what do you do after you cre­ate that com­mu­ni­ty gar­den plot? What do you do after you get that bike lane in? What else can a small com­mu­ni­ty do? 

Anderson: So it’s almost like the ques­tion you’re ask­ing is, are the cur­rent par­al­lel sys­tems remote­ly big enough to han­dle these chal­lenges, or do we need like a toolk­it for small towns to make much more com­pli­cat­ed par­al­lel systems.

Prendergast: Yeah, that’s kin­da what I’m inter­est­ed in. I’d like to know what that would be. What would that new Whole Earth Catalog look like?

Anderson: We talked for three hours…and I coul­da gone down that road. I think with Charles you could prob­a­bly go back and say, ​“Hey man, we had a bunch of thoughts about this. Do you want to riff on these ideas more?” and I’m sure he would say yes.

Saul: I was also real­ly sort of fas­ci­nat­ed by these par­al­lel com­mu­ni­ties. I had a lit­tle bit of a…problem?…with it? You know, there’s the farm­ers mar­kets and bike lanes, which makes sense—they exist in our com­mu­ni­ties now. Then there was sort of the next step? where he’s talk­ing about those in con­junc­tion with this sort of post-work thing and you start get­ting to these reciprocity-based economies. Which…also sound kind of idyl­lic and utopic in their way. 

But he has them existing…parallel, right. And in some ways feed­ing off of the sur­plus of the larg­er growth-based economies that we cur­rent­ly have. And I guess my ques­tion is how do you pro­tect those small economies from the growth-based econ­o­my? I mean, if you view the growth-based econ­o­my as this sort of…monster devour­ing every­thing (which I think a lot of peo­ple we’ve talked to do; some don’t, obvi­ous­ly), how do you pre­serve this lit­tle more-idyllic, utopic com­mu­ni­ty in the face of that?

Anderson: I’m pulling this from a lot of con­ver­sa­tion that was edit­ed out of what we’re post­ing here. But my guess would be that he would feel well, you know these par­al­lel sys­tems, they just need to exist as almost reminders of an idea. Reminders that you can do it in this oth­er way. Maybe it does­n’t need to be a full-fledged econ­o­my. Maybe it isn’t ever going to suc­cess­ful­ly com­pete with the larg­er growth-based econ­o­my. But you just need to have those farm­ers mar­kets there so when the growth-based econ­o­my crash­es face-first into a wall, which he does expect, you have mod­els of development.

There’ve been oth­er thinkers in this project who’ve talked about sim­i­lar things. Chuck Collins men­tion­ing that real­ly what you need to do is you need to have ideas in place. And that ideas, when they’re need­ed they can spread real­ly fast. So it’s just what you need to do is you need to have the ideas more than have like, a ful­ly func­tion­ing par­al­lel economy.

Prendergast: It actu­al­ly kin­da reminds me of some of the work that peo­ple in local farm­ing move­ment con­duct. Think of the seed-saving type of farmer gar­den­er. They want to make sure that seed con­tin­ues into the future. But for that to hap­pen, you have to have some­body actu­al­ly using that seed. You can’t just put that seed in a seed bank. Somebody actu­al­ly has to use it.

Saul: I like that. You need to actu­al­ly use it to pre­serve it. And my big take away from this con­ver­sa­tion was right there at the end. He was talk­ing about what knowl­edge and con­ver­sa­tion or good for, and it’s…the con­ver­sa­tion is use­ful because it lays the ground­work for the things we’ll need when we’re all fucked.

Anderson: Which is inter­est­ing, but it did leave me think­ing that like, this is a col­lapse sce­nario which is pret­ty rosy. And that’s rare in this project. 

This is The Conversation and that was Charles Hugh Smith, record­ed on June 10^th, 2013 in Berkeley, California.