https://leafbox.substack.com/p/interview-charles-hugh-smith?ref=leafbox.com#details 

Hi, everyone. Thanks for listening. Today, we're joined by an insightful writer and thinker, Charles Hugh Smith, who writes the status quo was broken, unsustainable. I've been following Charles Hughes blogs and writings for several years, and he writes about everything from the problems in our moral decay, our erosion of social and financial skills, systemic issues, regulation, environmental problems and everyday solutions of the labor class and middle class as well as rooted inequalities and worldwide issues. Charles Pierce is beneath the surface of problems.

He looks at them from a practical and mental framework And today, I was grateful for his time as we dive into his biography, the role of his upbringing in Hawaii, especially the island of Lanai, his creative interests and his pursuits for sharing and exploring for those trying to adapt and understand and reshape the world. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy this conversation. 1st, thanks so much for participating in this. And like I said in my email, I mean, your content is very broad.

So I and since we're both in Hawaii, I thought maybe we could start there. I have a friend who works for the Four Seasons on Lanai. So I've been to Lanai a few times to go hunting and just, you know, snorkeling. And I saw your bio that you lived on Lanai during the late 60s. And I wanted to maybe just start there and how maybe lanai has shaped you or not, and just some of your experiences there.

Yeah. That's a terrific starting spot. And the, I guess, hesitation I have, if if I can call it that, is that it's very easy to be nostalgic about that era in Hawaii, which, is, the era of the late sixties through the seventies, because it it had it shared characteristics with the really old days, the pre statehood, you know, fifties, and the boom years of the early 60s. But it also was the transitional period of the Hawaiian Renaissance and the counterculture, which, of course, were were dual forces. In other words, the counterculture was in Hawaii, but it it found unique expression in Hawaii because it was, sort of the fuel of the Hawaiian renaissance of of hula music, political activity, and a reclaiming of history that had been dismissed or forgotten, depending on your perspective.

But in any event so, therefore, when I speak to my old, friends, my teammates, on the basketball team, on lanai, many of them expressed a form of nostalgia over those years because life seemed safe and secure in ways that life is no longer safe and secure. And I can discuss that sort of socioeconomically, that one of the graziers I have from my, life on Wai, as brief as it was a year, was an experience of the old plantation economy. And that when I was a vibrant, profitable plantation for pineapple And virtually the entire town, you know, worked for Dole or lived off of the population that worked for Dole. There was only a smattering of people who worked for the the bank, the little bank there, the the little post office, and there was very little government. Like, state or county offices were basically nonexistent.

So it was a plantation town, and it was a union plantation town, meaning that the the decades of ruthless exploitation had led to all the turmoil and challenges and crises of of the union movement in Hawaii, which ultimately led to reasonable wages, low cost housing. And so people on Lanai, their work was hard. I mean, brutally hard. I I worked, that one summer, in the fields along with some of my younger classmates. And it was it's pretty hard to find work that is more physically demanding than being out in a blistering tropical sun.

And you're you're you're basically picking 100 of pounds of of fruit that grows in a very prickly plant, and you're working you're walking, you know, for hours and hours. And so, yeah, it's physically challenging. And so if you do that work, you also come to appreciate all other work you ever do is light unless you're really gonna do something strenuous. So anyways, I in sort of summary, there were a lot of positives to the Lanai Plantation experience. And I understand why my my classmates who grew up there look back on it fondly because it it, there were no hard drugs.

The amusements of life were, as you say, hunting and fishing, playing sports. What we would look at now is sort of healthy, positive experiences. And so and then you had, lifetime employment. You had a very secure economic situation so that the majority of families on one eye, could could save up enough money to send their children to college in Honolulu or or the mainland. So that kind of security is what's, of course, lacking for the bottom, say, 80 to 90 percent of American households now, in my view.

So there's that. And so I I'm I don't wanna ramble. So I think that the other elements that were so positive about lanai was the sense of community. And I was the new kid in town, and so that was a bit, strange, for them and for me because my brother and I were basically the only Hollies in the school, other than the principal's daughter. And so we were a bit weird to everyone else.

Right? We were struggling to learn Pidgin, which was kind of on Lanai, you know. So, plenty plenty of Pidgin. So it was, super engaging, and I just learned a tremendous amount. And and my classmates, I don't know what they gained out of me, but I might have been sort of an amusing mascot in some way.

I don't know. Well, the reason, Charles, I wanted to start with Lanai is that everything I read maybe you can just describe what you do and aren't familiar with your work. Well, real briefly, I think I've divided my life between academic or intellectual pursuits, like writing and trying to summarize social, economic trends and systems, and I've and physical labor, still labor as a carpenter and, builder. So I have a lot of practical experience that I continue to use, and yet I also have these sort of intellectual pursuits. Well, I connect back to Lanai because, I mean, obviously you had the physical work of working on the plantation, being an outsider.

But I was really fascinated as well because you had that kind of underground newspaper. And, maybe you can just tell us about that and how that I feel like it's the same thing you're doing now. You're kind of producing this underground publication that's popular, and I'm just curious what you were writing about then, and if there's any link or if there's not. Well, Robert, I really appreciate that insightful question, and I don't know how many other people pick up on that. But, yeah, I think it is a continuation that, my one of my classmates, Colbert Matsumoto, who went on to become a key player in the sort of establishment of Hawaii in terms of his investigation into wrongdoing in the Bishop estate that started his career and his many roles as in service to the public good in Hawaii.

Extremely admirable individual. He and I launched this underground newspaper because we'd we'd read somewhere about this is the hot new thing to do. Right? Start an underground newspaper. And so, his father worked for the ILWU, the union, and so we were able to sneak in and use the mimeograph machine when no one was looking.

And so we wrote about environmental issues. This was Earth Day 1970, was that era. That was the nascent beginnings of the environmental movement. And we wrote about the, just some of the high school things like, well, the basketball team gets all the money, and what about all the other sports, and things like that. But it it was, a revelation for the school because, we heard sort of secondhand that the administration, which was basically the principal and the vice principal, thought that it was, composed by teachers because a lot of the teachers were young haoles that have been recruited directly from the mainland because at that time, the DOE was extremely short of teachers that the the state's population was expanding, the baby boom, and so on.

So, we said, no, it was us and there were no teachers involved. And so and so we had a lot of, fun doing that, and we also collected contributions from students. We had a little box in in one of the teachers' classrooms to, put balloons and bits of things in there. And we would select, kind of, play editor and run the run the real poems and and leave out the song lyrics that somebody copied off a song. So, yeah, it was it was quite an education.

And then, I mean, I'm just linking to the themes that you're exploring now. Maybe you can kind of draw parallels if there are any. Well, I think the of course, I think we all are aware of the environmental costs and consequences of global industrialization, what I now call the waste is growth landfill economy. At that time, it was, the the era in which rivers were catching fire in the American Midwest from just gross levels of of pollution and toxins being dumped into public waterways and air. So I think that's a continuation.

And I think we're still in that environment, grappling with the consequences of this giant global economy we've created to generate a huge surplus of goods and services. But by basically not really, making a full accounting of the costs and consequences of that giant industrial machine. Right? So I think that's one thread. And then a sense of justice, I think, that fair play.

Like, is everybody getting the same square deal Or are some people getting first in line, so to speak? If that's the case, then what can we do about it? So there's some sort of like examination of problems and solutions. So I think those are the threads that carry through. A lot of your writing kind of you link to the idea of neo neofeudalism.

After Lanai, you jumped to Oahu and then you went to Punahou. I'm curious how that switch was and how, if anything, that's affected your lens of seeing the world. Yeah. Well, Robert, I again, I I am extremely appreciative of your super insightful questions because I think a lot of people tend to gloss over what happens in our teenage years. People understand the impact of what you experienced as a child, especially if it was traumatic or unpleasant.

But your teen years are where you blossom as as an individual, as character, as a personality, and you start acquiring your adult interests as you as you navigate teen years. And so, in a way, I was blessed that I got to go to 3 high schools in 4 years. And so from California to Lanai was a transition that really opened my eyes. And then to Punahou, which even though I lived on Lanai, I didn't really understand the the the place that Punahou held in the local psyche, history and socioeconomic sort of establishment. Right?

And so even now, and then Punahou has changed a lot. In other words, back this is 50 years ago. There was although it's a very it was very reflective mix of of the ethnicities and classes that are in Hawaii today, it was its reputation was more like where the elite holidays went. And so that's changed a lot. And in fact, my friend, Colbert's daughters went there, and he said, no.

No. That's not the case anymore. And so it it it's changed with the times, and I think, as all institutions do. So but at that time, it was also, it had this reputation that if you could get your child into Punahou, you'd really made it, and they were gonna have a better life as a result. And that is still present today.

In other words, I hear that pride when other people, like acquaintances or neighbors say, oh, and my grandchild is in Punahou. And and, of course, people feel the same pride about Chamehameha, rightly so, and Iolani, and you know? But this whole the whole neo feudal aspect of it, as you, as I think you you anticipate, is that what's this thing about private schools? I mean, why are they so important in in Hawaii, especially, I mean, especially Oahu? And why is that the case?

And why do they play such a role in in catapulting your child into a higher category of socioeconomic opportunity? And of course, the answer is, well, the public schools are underfunded or they're not getting the resources. This is sort of Neo feudal, right? There's 2 class systems. That is, of course, troubling for anybody that that says, well, wait a minute.

What's a democracy mean? Right? And and what is an what does a free market economy that that's open to all? What are these how do these line up in in in a neofeudal setting? And, of course, the history of Hawaii is also neofeudal in that the occupying forces, both corporate and and political, set themselves up at the top.

And so at that era was also the era of the big five. There were 5 large corporations that dominated the public or the private sector and were highly influential in politics. And those, ironically, are all gone. There's not a shred left except Alexander and Baldwin on Maui. And so, things change.

Yeah, the Neo feudal aspects were a shock to me and I was really afraid, going to Punahou once I kinda caught on that I was shoved into some elite school as a senior, the only senior. That was new. Right? I mean, you just they they didn't they don't accept people after, generally, other than, like, say, the freshman class is, like, the last time you get in, do okay. In other words, I realized I you know, when you're faced with severe strict high level competition in whatever field you're doing, then you, of course, you up your game and you find out your limits.

And, and that's very useful to you in life. So you should always get into a situation where you're pushed to your limit or beyond because then you really discover what you're good at, what you're okay at, and what you're really not good at. And so I was not good at math and physics at the higher level. I was like, okay, I'm struggling here. This is this is supposed to be easy.

Right? Learned the differences that you might not be from the outside between what we can call the upper middle class and the middle class and the working class. In other words, this sort of class structure to neofeudalism. That is still, there still has some social mobility available in the US, unlike unlike a truly feudal economy where that social mobility was extremely limited. You can claw your way into the higher reaches of the economy and society, but it really helps if you understand the value system that that you're, you need to acquire.

It's not just working hard and saving money or getting into an elite institution. You have to have this whole set of values if you wanna work in that higher level. So what do you see the parallels between that kind of model? And let's jump up a level for the United States as a whole and then potentially for the world. I think that's a great the scale you write on is usually local.

I mean, you had that wonderful essay about the time capsule. I don't know if you could start there. I don't know. Yeah. The well, the time capsule got a lot of interesting, feedback from people who could relate to it.

And what what the story was was, you know, we've taken care of my mom-in-law here, and she's, been she's lived within a 10 mile radius of of where she was born here on the Big Island her whole life. And so she was born in 1931. And so when you listen to someone born in the late 20 or early thirties, you're basically entering a time capsule of the thirties, forties, and fifties when they were youthful and and forging their life. And so life was, of course, a lot simpler, and it was a lot poorer in terms of material wealth. But what people related to was there was a the the wealth was in community and stability.

The the family structure and the community structure, because of the poverty, then then these were really strong structures that you could count on. And so people counted on other people rather than the government to send them money or what we now think of as financial security. Like, how much money do you have in your 401 k? You know what I mean? So that was part of it.

Like, the idea of of of examining what is security and and wealth and prosperity. And so everybody understands material wealth, but we've sort of lost sight of the wealth that comes from strong family and community ties in terms of well-being. And this is a term that I use a lot because there's not many other words in English or phrases in English that that talk about the sense of of security and stability, feeling safe in life, and and having people that you can count on. So those are and, of course, your physical wealth and health being. Right?

Well-being. And so a lot of these people live live into their nineties. We have lots of neighbors. Some have turned a 100. Others are 99.

And it's like, are they doing some kind of magical, you know, strict super, scarce diet of spiritual goods. No. They just ate like local food, but they had a very healthy active lifestyle and community support. And so we we forget that health is the mind and body are 1. And so, you know, it's not just what you put in your mouth, but it's like the environment you live in.

So all of that comes back to, okay, your larger your question, what about the US and the and the world? And it's really clear, like, statistically, and this is what I I try not to do too many statistical things, but you look at a graph or a chart, and it brings it home that, well, like, 10% of every population owns, like, 90% of the wealth virtually anywhere. And so there's these huge disparities of wealth, which, of course, equals power in terms of political power and influence. So we we live in what seems to be a neofeudal structure of of which a a a certain limited class of households own most of the wealth of the nation. And this this plays out across the world.

It's true of of of China and as as and many other places as well as as the US. So we can say, why is this? What what's the dynamics in these systems that create this or or enable it or maintain it? And what can we do? What can we hope to change in that?

And so it and and, of course, it's a different era too in that we can go back in history and go, well, there was less. There's always an elite. Right? Because humans are social animals, and we are we are genetically wired for hierarchies, just like our cousins to to chimpanzees. And so it's it's like we are used to the idea of of having leaders, and then they get some privileges for their, their leadership, presuming it's it's a positive leadership.

But regardless, they get they get a bigger share, but, you know, it's supposedly in trade for doing something for the the rest of us or the community. But that seems to have broken down, and so people are getting the wealth without actually providing for the common good. And, that, I think, is part of the decay and decline I see, and I think it's global. Connecting back to, I guess, the local, I I think we can talk about your solutions and how maybe later, but I want to talk about your work as a carpenter and going back to kind of your pineapple picking days and how that's because you're always jumping between kind of the cerebral and then the physical. So I'm curious how that's informing.

Are you outside this neo feudal system? Are you jumping around it? I'm curious where you see yourself in it. That's also a great question, Robert. Thank you very much.

And and you, of course, have, and I can relate to to the the the limits of what I know about your life that you sketched out. I I can see you also moving, whether you wanna call it up, down, sideways, or in orbit it threw out this complex socioeconomic system that you've been an entrepreneur and been successful at things and tried many things. And so I'm kind of I would put myself on the margins of the the status quo. In other words, I've never had a corporate job. I've never worked for the government.

I mean, if you call picking pineapple or working for a corporation, that was my corporate job. I did a variety of things. I've been an entrepreneur, and I think I I basically failed in the sense of financially. I did not succeed as a builder, but I gained a huge wealth of experience. So I think I think I'm on the margins of society because I enjoy physical work, which is not valued very much in our society.

And it tends to be looked down upon and, somehow lesser. There's lesser nobility in in in physical work than in in intellectual work. And, of course, I don't think that's a fair assessment. But I think that the practical world where you're building something and you're trying to manage people, materials that you've got to get on-site, and bunch of complicated stuff to get physical work done in the real world, that gives you a different perspective than than people that just don't really have any physical skills, and they don't really know what's involved in stuff that they take for granted. Like, for instance, there's just an endless amount of things.

The sewage system, the water treatment plant, you know, roadways, the electrical lines. And so when people talk about, oh, we're all gonna have, like, electric cars and, you know, helicopters and everything, it's all like I'm I'm because I'm practical, and I think about, well, how would I assemble or fix an electric car or electric helicopter? It would be like, well, what do we do with all these batteries? It's like, oh, well, we throw 98% of them in the landfill. And it's all like, well, well, is that gonna be is is that really sustainable?

I mean, where and so those are the kind of questions that come up to people, I think, that arise in in those of us who clients and so on. You also have an appreciation for life outside some kind of rigid hierarchy. Like, for instance, if you're an academic and you're in the university, it's a hierarchy and you learn to navigate that that hierarchy. We're in the private sector, which is, you know, the more rough and tumble, then you have to establish your own connections. And they're often more sideways than top to bottom hierarchies.

You're working with people. And that gives you a whole another understanding of the complexity of getting anything done in the real world. You know? So, that's a kind of a rambling answer, but my practical side has informed my intellectual interest because I'm very interested in the exact way that we're supposed to fix problems. Like, exactly what resources are required, where are they coming from, how costly is it to get them here, process them, and turn them into something?

And then how do we actually physically recycle that? I mean, what's involved? And so those those are the questions that everyone glosses over that that that's sitting in the top ear of the, you know, media or academia. That those things are all kind of often just brushed off. Like, oh, well, you know, we have top people working on that.

You know, it'll no problem. It'll all get recycled. It's all like, really? How come it's not recycled now? It must not be very profitable or else Google would be doing it.

So those are the kinds of questions that arise if you have any practical experience in the world. So then maybe jumping forward a bit, can you maybe expand on your small press? I think you started I forget the name Voltage Age, I believe it was called, and how that kind of then put you back into the, I guess, mind part of your work? Yeah. The, interesting.

Yeah. I wanted to I've had an interest in technology since high school. And so I did not choose a career or pursue a career in science or technology per se, but I was interested in the kind of commentary on on on how technology was developing. And so I I started, with my sister-in-law in Berkeley. I started a a magazine.

We started a magazine right around the time that several other people like Mondo 2000, was also started around that same time, the early eighties. And it was the idea of, hey, the technology is, developing in all kinds of new ways because of the personal computer and the the beginnings of the network, computer. And so let's let's, start these publications so we can comment about this. And so that was another failure financially, but, another success in terms of gaining experience and so on. And I was really interested in AI, and I read a lot of books about AI at that time.

And that's continued on. I don't claim to be an expert in AI, but I think I've been reading about it for, yeah, 30, 40 years. And so I have some foundation that we assume or that, that what I call the mythology of technological progress, we assume it's all gonna be good. And as critic, Jerry Mander, who wrote the book about the reasons, why we should turn off the TV. He was pointing out the technology, the mythology of technology is it's always going to be good.

It's always going to advance humanity in some way. And it's always the best case scenarios are what gets played, because that's what's profitable, of course. But there's there can be the worst case scenario too. And those get short shrift because those aren't very profitable. Right?

And so and they might cause the people who own the technology to get restricted in some way, and then they wouldn't be able to maximize their market share and and profitability. So we don't we don't look at at worst case scenarios. And so, anyways, that took my interest in these kinds of what I call mythologies about technology. Go back to that the early eighties when there was a wave of of AI enthusiasm. There was a wave of AI enthusiasm in the late sixties, and then it kinda petered out when everybody realized so called general intelligence was not gonna be, achievable.

Then there was another wave, due to, you know, faster processors and so on in the eighties, the early eighties. And then that kinda petered out, and now we've had a resurgence of of interest. And what's a little different about it this time is now there's some more interest in, the downside, the the potential worst case of AI basically taking over humanity and turning us into goo or in that kind of extreme, but also just looking at, like, well, what happens when we when everybody's voice can be mimicked or everybody's image can be mimicked? These are questions that are are real, and, and and it's not it's not clear if they're still if they're controllable. But but we should at least ask whether they should be controllable.

Familiar with the author, Dimitri Orlov? Yes. In fact, I corresponded with Dimitri back in the day, maybe 20 some years ago, when I think he I think he wrote, his book, Reinventing Collapse. I'm not sure of the exact date, but, yeah, we we we corresponded occasionally. Well, there's just a lot of parallels because, you know, he's an intellectual and also concerned, you know, he does a lot of labor with his hands, you know, building boats and I guess he now he's in Russia, you know, returning back to Russia and he writes a lot about he has a book called, I think, shrinking the technosphere where he writes a lot about concerns and opportunities and technology.

So there's and then obviously his scenarios on collapse. A difference between you and him though, you had an essay on, I guess, what I would call doomerism. And I'm curious where you maybe you can expand on that essay and where you see yourself in that hierarchy or in that doom model. I I find you quite optimistic and positive, but I'm just curious where you see yourself in that kind of if you're in a state late stage of collapse or where you where you fit in into that kind of sense making. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you for that question too, Robert. And, I think we all we all understand the the appeal of disaster movies and, of course, they can often be amusing in how far they have to reach now to impress the audience. You know, you've got to have a 1,000 foot tall, you know, tsunami and stuff to to top the previous disaster movie. And so, there is a kind of doom porn, is what I call it, where if there's almost a pornography of doom where people, pursue these sort of salacious scenarios of total chaos and destruction of civilization and so on.

And then there's the other end of that spectrum is what I call, like, empty optimism. And that's the, sort of, to me, sort of breezy, uninformed, unconnected from the real world assumptions that we're all gonna it's all gonna be fine because we've got top people working on it, and we'll we'll be able to the whole global economy and recycle all the batteries, and and everything's gonna be great. And but there's no details in any of that stuff. Like, nobody actually explains, like, how complicated a lithium ion battery is and how many components there are in there and the incredible difficulty of trying to separate those components and actually reuse them in in some way. And it turns out that's not a real problem at all.

And in fact, the product has to be reengineered to be recyclable, which means it's gonna cost more money and therefore it's gonna be less profitable and, you know, so on. So I'm more in, I think I'm kind of in the middle of that, in that I see the vulnerability of these enormous systems we've created that they look just as systems. And this is what I'm really interested in. Systems share dynamics across the entire spectrum and their scale and variant. Meaning that the system that you have for your your sole proprietorship or your household, there are system, system dynamics in play there that play out in the community, in the town, the city, the region, the country, you know, then the world.

And so, if you have these, systems which are very vulnerable because they're they they have a lot of fragile features. Like, there there's, like, sole suppliers of of things, or there's a one supply chain for for an essential component. These kinds of systems are really easy to disrupt or fall apart. And I also am curious to see how capitalism plays out in this way, which is you get rid of redundancy and and multiple suppliers and multiple supply chains because those are those are cost, elements. So the way to maximize your profit is get rid of redundancy and and multiple supply chains.

And so I I use that as an example to show how systems can fall apart. And the more dependent we are on these sort of fragile systems, then, of course, the the greater the potential for dominoes to fall. For example, you know, the the the semiconductors, you know, went into scarcity, and so then they they they couldn't make all the vehicles anymore. That that kind of thing can go into things that are like the electrical grid, water treatment. There's a lot of other things that can be impacted that will definitely, reduce comfort and convenience.

And so that's that all stuff is that stuff is real. You don't need a nuclear war or a 1,000 foot tsunami. You you simply need a decay of these long global supply chains. And people are aware of this. And so there's this an attempt to reshore industry and to talk about food security, which to me is a big issue here in Hawaii.

I think we're just catastrophically dependent on outside sources for food in a way that was not the case 60 years ago, as an example. So I think that the positive part is is like that. 1st, food security, you start looking at what you can do to encourage food production, you know, in your own locale and and reduce your dependency. It's never gonna go to 0. You know, we still need industrial parts and, complex machinery.

But we if we reduce our dependence, that's gonna put us further along the the spectrum towards reducing potential of collapse and and and also kind of ensuring some kind of basic comfort and and convenience. So the question is, also, what what role does history have in in in showing us how humans have responded in the past to these kinds of decays of complex system? And, of course, there's this this there's an entire library of books about collapse and the dynamics and the history of it. You know, we're still running wet wear 1.0, meaning that most of our genetic, makeup is from, like, 200000 years ago when we, you know, entered the the sort of modern Homo Sapiensapien era, and we were hunter gatherers. And our skill sets and the way we are used to working together were all optimized by hunting and gathering.

So, we learned, you know, communication and and cultural knowledge were critical working together. Some competition for for mating and and leadership, you know, kinda kept things vibrant. And so all a lot of these elements will continue on even if, like, industrial civilization collapses because we're still gonna be we can still we still have our hunter gatherer genetic heritage and of working together and and valuing, communication, cultural knowledge, and so on. So, if we look back at at civilizations that were extremely complex, such as the Western Roman Empire, what John Michael Greer calls catabolic collapse. Right?

Like, it kind of, you know, complexity is reduced to a new level, and then it drops up to another lower level. And so you can kinda go down the ladder. It wasn't like 99% of the people in the Western Roman Empire just up and died. You know, they just, they went to a much lower level of complexity. And they they formed over the time of what we call the the dark ages.

They they formed, different ways of of dealing with things. If we've sort of relocalized our our lives and our economy, then, you know, we're we're gonna do okay. We're gonna survive and be fine. Maybe jumping to one specific focus of your analysis, I'm curious why so many writers have, I'm going to call collapse and doom and kind of your focus on decentralization and things like that. Where does the heavy focus on finance come from and interest?

It seems like, you know, Dimitri Orlov writes about that. Jonathan Brier writes about that. Other, you know, Lawrence Hughes, I don't know if you remember him, but he's another kind of doomer on more of the environmental, extensionati type. They're always obsessed with finance. I'm curious where you see the importance of finance, specifically how you got interested in and what you're trying to do or communicate when you focus on writing on finance.

I I I'm I'm sorry to keep repeating just how insightful these questions are. I mean, truly, you're you're getting to the 4 elements of, like, the global crisis or, situation. And and so, yeah, the and I think you're right to call it an obsession with finance. And because finance has replaced the real world in so many ways, that replacement has been put in at the top of the pyramid. So that we think because of this erosion of the real world into, like, some sort of background handled by somebody else in some know, developing world country.

Finance is is like the be all the end all because it seems to be that in our economy and society today. Like, in other words, if there's a problem, then we're we turn to the federal reserve to do something or rather by printing money or creating credit or whatever, or the government's supposed to borrow another trillion and spend it, and then that's gonna fix the problems. Finance has sort of elevated itself as as a as a sector in the economy and as a point of leverage in the economy. It's like this progression from a economy that you could say was more like task based, and therefore, finance played a very limited role in that economy. How did we go from that where you saved your earnings and then you invested it in a tool or some improvement in your life or the education of your children, etcetera, to a life where literally everything is based on credit, like borrowing money.

Like you can't buy a vehicle without that. You can't buy a house. You can't fund your university education without borrowing a couple of $1,000,000,000,000. And so, this reliance on credit is what's built finance up to such a large force in in the economy. In other words, so people sort of understand if finance elapses, that means we have no credit, which means we can't borrow money, which means we can't buy houses, cars, university educations, or virtually anything of value.

And so it's all like, well, wait a minute. How do we get so dependent on on finance? And, of course, the answer is that the cost of living has increased so dramatically compared to wages that people simply cannot afford to save enough money to pay for these things. And there's there's other dynamics in play that I talk about, like the bureau the the rise of the bureaucracy or the administrative state. And there's charts I've posted where it shows rather really kind of striking that the number of doctors say in the healthcare system has barely risen in decades, but the number of administrators is kind of like tenfold.

And the same is true of the university system, that the number of tenured professors is basically the same as it was, you know, 30 years ago. But the number of administrators has skyrocketed, and the salaries that they're earning have have soared. And so and then we're we're we have to kinda look at that and go, well, wait a minute. Maybe the reason why finance is now dominant is that we've we've without really noticing it, we've become totally dependent on on credit, the distribution of new money. In other words, the central bank issuing money out of thin air, and then the government issuing money out of thin air and so on, that these are now what we depend on.

And I do wanna push back on that, in my from my little, birch because I don't think there's a financial solution to the decay of social, good and civic virtue and, relocalization. I don't think that finance plays much of a role in any of that. And so when people talk about cryptocurrencies as, like, the solution, right, or gold or something like that, as if we just get some other form of money, then it's all gonna be fine. It's like they're overlooking that credit is like the the primary engine of the economy. And it's the primary engine because people don't have enough disposable income to pay for anything beyond everyday, expenses.

And so, how do you fix that? And so, then you say, well, if you're gonna talk about reforming finance, it has to be reformed in in tandem with labor. In other words, if you if you you you have to be able to compensate people with your whatever form of money you're using so that they can actually afford everything out of their earnings instead of having to borrow money. And so that's the basis of my labor backed currency idea. Charles, coming back to some of your thoughts, you jump between ideological frameworks.

You seem critical of finance and late stage capitalism, but you're not coming at it kind of a socialist or Marxist analysis, but you're still emphasizing labor. So I'm just curious how you shift your lenses or what your kind of ideological or political analysis is rooted in. Is it kind of the quaker? I know you were a quaker or had some relevance to the Quaker movement. So I'm just curious where you're kind of basing your moral or kind of labor analysis, particularly in.

Well, again, that's a great question. And again, I I I I just love being able to talk about these important things that that are usually glossed over in in our lives, which is, like, where are you coming from at the core of your being? And how is that manifesting in your your view of life or your you know, what idea ideology appeals to you? Certainly, the core of Quakerism and Buddhism and Taoism, all of which have been are continue to be strong influences in my life, is there's there there should be a sense of justice and fair play. In other words, that that the core of what we call progress or a success or whatever is really about is does everybody have a fair dance, and to fulfill their lives and and opportunity?

So the and and so this ties together, in my view. And, again, I'm I'm I majored in philosophy, you know, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Eastern and Western. So I'm pretty familiar, you know, with the with the fundamentals of of Eastern thought and Western thought. And so, like, if you look at Marxism, and I did, in fact, study Marxism at for a year with, professor Bender. Marx's floor, although he doesn't it's not really talked about much, was a sense of outrage at the injustice of of the economic system he saw of exploitation of the masses to the benefit of the few.

And this is the driving force behind his his whole, analysis of of of the economy and society. So I I draw a lot upon Marx, not so much for his solutions, which, you know, he and Ingalls really kinda left that. That's kind of that warm and fuzzy kind of like, empty optimism. So I'm saying that, they didn't really sketch out, like, details of of a solution, but they they, Marx did illuminate these dynamics of of capitalism that that generate, exploitation and not as a bug, but as a feature. And so I I I I I, I know I confuse people because it's all like, well, wait a minute.

Are you in favor of of of competition? And the I my answer is, well, yeah. In limited context. A global, competition that's an that has no limits because that's then you end up with an exploitive system. So, yeah, I draw upon, Marxism, as as as because his illumination of of these economic forces is still, relevant.

And then but you but if as an entrepreneur, you go, well, is socialism the answer? And then on two fronts, I would say no. Because number 1, socialism is based on the same, flawed model of growth as capitalism. I I mean, whether it's communist, socialist, or capitalist, every every system is pursuing, what I call the waste is growth landfill economy. Nobody's pursuing deep growth or a sustainable economy.

There's, you know, kinda like polite talk about it, but nobody's actually doing any of that as a goal of the ideology. So all the ideologies are the same if you looked at it environmentally. And then the other issue is, where is the opportunity for exploitation in socialism and communism? And, of course, we all know the answer is there's plenty of opportunity for, the few to rig the system to, to benefit themselves at the expense of the many. And so what you wanna have ideally, I think, is a flattened, structure where the, you know, the the what's optimized isn't some elite, benefiting themselves at the expense of everyone else.

But what's optimized is is is having feedback and, pushback and, kind of a churn where, you know, nobody's allowed to to rig the system because there's, there's gonna be pushback from other players or other participants. And so you have a a more dynamic system where there's more dissent, and more entrepreneurship, people trying stuff to see if it works and then sharing what works with other people. Charles, I was going to ask, maybe we can shift some of your your non fiction books and how you start offering solutions. I mean, you brushed upon solutions from an entrepreneurial perspective. I'm just curious, Maybe you can walk us through your books and some of what you're doing with those titles as well.

Okay. Real quick. I'll try to keep it brief, but, I've I've I've touched on a lot of different topics and, just I'll, I'll choose a few. One is I looked at the whole higher education system, which I think is corrupt, venal, exploitive, a classic neo feudal structure. That's what it's become.

And I don't think it's really serving the students that well. And a lot of people agree with me, of course, on that. So what's the solution? And so my solution was, this sort of nearly free university model, which, you know, relies on the fact that digital content is basically free to deliver. And, so if you get rid of if you scrape off the profiteering and, the neo feudal structure, then, you know, education can be practically free.

And then, especially, if you combine it with a hands on kind of, workshop model, then, you know, students would then be given an opportunity to learn hands on in whatever field they've chosen, even in the sciences. Right? Or so that's a model that I think would would benefit us tremendously. And then it kind of ties into my other model about, in my book on how to get a job and build a real career. The idea there is to, authenticate and, you know, yourself.

In other words, don't rely on a credential to, authenticate your your knowledge or experience. Just authenticate yourself. And and so kind of like take charge of your own career instead of, just trying to select the institutional stamps. And then, focusing on trying to get, like, what I consider the basic eight skills that that apply to any field, any job, any endeavor. The skills that every institution, every business, everybody else, every community group values in a in a in an individual.

You know? So if you get those skills and values, then, you're you're gonna gonna have opportunities because those are what everybody values because they're they're so useful. So those are a couple of ideas. And then I also talked about, like, the idea that AI is going to replace all the humans or get rid of most of the jobs. And so we'll all be either living off borrowed money or some sort of magical free money thing, or we'll be impoverished.

I I proposed instead that that all work be paid and and that the financial system be reorganized to focus on labor so that all work would be paid and valued. And that, AI can be a tool or, you know, an aid, but it doesn't replace human labor. And because every human wants to contribute and be valued and actually to be part of something larger than themselves. And so the the goal of our entire economic system should be to provide that opportunity for everyone and to pay them so that, they they can they can have a livelihood. And that optimizing an economy for that is, really a different economy, but I I consider it the the right goal.

So those are some of my ideas about, solutions. You know? And then most recently, I've talked about burnout because I, you know, I'm kind of a type a person. And so I've I've burned out a couple, three times in my life where you push yourself too hard, and then you are become basically incapacitated. So I wanted to share my experience of burnout in the hopes that other people could gain some insight into their own burnout.

And then I talked about self reliance, because that's that's, I think, part of the whole idea of relocalizing our economy as well. Where does that start? And it's like, is it some kind of government grant or some kind of, you know, big institution has to be involved? And it's like, well, no. Actually, it just starts in your own yard, if you have a yard or a community garden.

And I've had a long interest in this. In fact, I I was first in line at the Makiki, community garden when it opened in, like, 1979 or something like that. 78, 75. I don't know. Back in the seventies.

And so there's a lot that we could do to just start growing surplus food in our on our own. We we don't need necessarily an institution. Although, that would be nice. I'm curious what you think about multipolarity and how that ties into your concepts on decentralization and localization. Could you sketch out what multipolarity means?

Well, there's a lot of writers right now who are, you know, I think pretty clearly documenting that the western hegemonic, you know, polar world is changing. There's BRICS, there's China, there's India, there's, you know, new it all ties into your finance and your collapse and localization. So I'm just curious how you see, you know, with the growth of China or the growth of India, the weakening of the US model, you know, there's wars all over the world re emerging, the 4th turning, you know, there's a change. And I wonder how your book Self Reliance is a response to some of the greater If there's a collapse of the neofeudal kind of system, so people have to kind of localize their solutions, just like your grandma did. You're right, Robert.

That's exactly the drift of what I see as the positive way to deal with this. There's no time machine to go back. And the the multipolarity, I see as a positive, I mean, it it of course, there are negatives and trade offs in any kind of global change. But the multipolarity, I think, is is ultimately positive for the planet because the the competition that I value is is not what we think of as as market competition where you crush your opponents and or buy them out so you dominate the market. That's that's actually not you know, that's capitalism, but not competition.

Competition is open and transparent. And and, so therefore, a multipolar world is issuing new currencies, new ideas, new ways of production, new ways to organize production, new ways to organize society. And not all of those are going to work. And they're not going to work for everyone. But at least, having that churn of competing ideas in currencies, that I think will strengthen, the humanities transition to a sustainable economy.

At least it it it opens the door to, change on multiple levels that that don't that don't need, like, some higher authority stamp of approval to get done, because that's the problem. Of course, when you have a centralized power with a small hierarchy at the top, then those people are only gonna rubber stamp what suits them and keeps the status quo that benefits them in exactly as it is. You know, they they don't mind policy tweaks on the edge, but they're not gonna actually let any of their power or wealth, dissipate and spread down to the bottom 99%. So you, you, you, you know, I guess my point being any kind of multipolarity, the the lower it riffs down into each nation and each region, then the better off humanity will be. So, hopefully, multipolarity will include not just, different centralized governments, competing, but, the new models of social organization within those nations that are more localized.

But, yeah, and I think, the 4th turning, Peter Turchin's 50 year cycle of of of of discord and and, disintegration. I I also see a lot of value in his work. There's just a lot of models that all that all turn on cycles or waves of disruption. And and the core of that we should we should remember is humans always expand their consumption up to the limits of the resources available. And then once they do that, they suck up the resources and deplete them.

And then, then there's a battle for the remaining resources that are insufficient for the consumption levels that people are you know, desire. And so that was true of Rome. That was true of, you know, 3000 BC. You know? I mean, it's a cycle of history.

And so I think we've reached that point. And that's one of the key drivers behind multi polarity is everybody's sensing there's not enough of everything to go around. And so it's like time to circle the wagons and try to compete or fight for our share, basically decaying into discord and and conflict. That's that's a key reason right there. So, yeah, self reliance and and relocalization are are answers to that.

And again, and it's not a perfect answer, but it's a it's any if you can reduce your dependency on fragile failing systems to any in any way, then it's gonna be beneficial. I'm curious how I haven't read your non fiction I mean, your fiction writing. Maybe you can just give me a framework for what you're doing in your fiction writing and if you explore these same themes or other themes or what you're doing and how you contrast it to writing modalities. Well, thank you for that. I guess it's just self expression.

And it's kind of like my recording my songs and stuff that a a key part of of being, I mean, to being a human is to explore yourself, try different things, and, and to express who you are. Right? And, that great philosopher, Bruce Lee and I say that sort of tongue in cheek, but, actually, he was, of course, extremely well read and and did have a a spiritual aspect to his, his martial arts. And and and he felt that martial arts was, in fact, at its core, self expression. Like, it wasn't about beating somebody up or being better skilled or whatever.

It was about self expression. And so I think that's a core driver of my fiction. I I tend to take one genre at a time. And so I've written, like, a, kid's mystery and then I've written a road novel. And yeah, it's just a form of self expression.

Other people have knitting or they, you know, they make ukuleles or other things. And I, you know, I write novels. Nobody reads. But it's, it's all good. It's all fun.

Well, I think it comes back to one of your messages is about being authentic. Yeah. I'm just curious where what your day to day writing or creative output is like? Do you spend most of the time just researching or what's your typical day to day output like? Yeah.

I guess it's, as as as an entrepreneur, I know that you know that self discipline is is is, like, the core skill of of of getting anything done that's gonna take a long time or, that you wanna see fulfilled, then, you know, you gotta have self discipline. So I'm I'm actually very disciplined. I don't I can't stand living online, more than a few hours a day. I I have to, like, get out and be in the real world. And so I don't really live online like a lot of other writers seem to do.

And so I just, I will research as needed, and I will keep the vlog going. But I I keep it going within this, strict form, which is what am I interested in today? Or what what's what's fascinating me? Or what do I wanna write about? And so if I don't have anything I wanna write about, then I don't I don't write anything.

I I don't force it. It's gotta be of some interest to me, something that I wanna share with my readership. And then I'm always writing a book and I'm always writing a novel. And so some are set aside to focus on one or the other. But so I always spend some time every week, on the book, rewriting it or, composing it, etcetera, etcetera.

So, yeah, I'm I'm actually extremely disciplined. And kind of like, again, it's a practical skill. If you wanna build a house, then you're gonna have to get out there and do some of the work every day. And then, eventually, you know, you make progress. So the thing is, write in the morning, and then go out and live in the real world.

You know, take care of the plants, do some weeding, etcetera. It's funny. I don't know if you listened to the interview I did with Cao Lin. He's on the big island as well. He's a writer.

You know, he's very rooted now in kind of doing I don't know if Hawaii does that to people but it kind of roots you in the physical a little bit more than say if you were, you know, a writer in New York or San Francisco. I'm just curious how coming back to the Big Bang has changed your relationship with labor and your mental labor. Yeah, that's a great question, too. And, actually, I in a way, I I owned I bought land when, when we were, my girlfriend and I were in this state. We were just, you know, we're young still, and we bought land in Puna with the idea of having a homestead.

And we just were didn't have the money. We just weren't capitalized enough to do that. You know, you just get a a chunk of lava, and then you're gonna try to turn it into something. It takes a lot of money. And so I had to go and, navigate the rest of the economy for decades to to have enough money to to buy, like, what other people consider just a normal old house.

But it has enough land where I can actually start growing stuff as I've always dreamed of. In other words, to have some big trees and, and gardens and stuff. And on the mainland, at least in California, if you're in the urban areas, it's too expensive to own more than a postage stamp of land. And so I had a garden in Berkeley with a peach tree and a lemon tree, but it was like really limited. And, you know, you've got 3 apartment buildings right around you walking your son.

And so to come back to Hawaii where the growing season is like every, you know, 365 days a year, it is, like, freeing. It's like entering it's like entering a a paradise opportunity for those of us that like to grow stuff. And so and and you and, you know, I don't know. It's like, well, I was I was 63. I was 62.

You know? And in other words, I I already worked 40 some years before I could really get what I wanted when I was 19. And but I think that's pretty, that's not uncommon. And so, yeah, it's it's like freeing to be able to grow whatever you want and just experiment. So it's really good fun.

And it's also so nourishing to grow a surplus that you can share. And that's the core of what we do. I mean, I grow 100 of pounds of breadfruit, bananas, and other stuff that that we share with our neighbors and family and stuff. So, that's, that's part of the benefit of it. It's really a social exercise to grow food.

Charles, my last two questions are, 1, what do you think I mean, you grew up in Hawaii, your formative years. What do you think the rest of the world can learn from kind of a Polynesian or Hawaiian or kind of this 'Hapa haole' mental state? I'm just curious what you think, you know, that we can export or that's maybe some ideas or I'm just curious what you think, what messages. I mean, aside from community or what lessons can be exported out? Yeah.

That's that's a very interesting question. And, of course, as a haole, I'm, reluctant to comment on, Hawaiian culture, Hawaiian history because I am an outsider. And so, therefore, no matter what my own experience is, it's, I'm hesitant to to make much of my experience here other than, you know, what I can grow in my yard here. You know, I grow Ulu. I grow taro.

I make my own poi. And so if you wanna talk about something related to Aina as as as the source of life, then then I can walk you around my yard. That's all I know. But beyond that, I think an appreciation for, ancestral cultures and the mixing of cultures. I mean, I think that's what Hawaii, can authentically, share that it is possible to appreciate and share the mix of cultures.

And as as we all know, boy is is, unique in in in the way of of of actually mixing bloodlines. In other words, there's just a tremendous mix of ethnicities in the people here and and in the marriages that create the people. Draw upon all of the, all of the all of the the sources that that they carry within them and the cultures. And and I, you know, I myself am am just a a, you know, Irish, you know, mostly Irish, Scottish, holy. But, there's obviously in my family, there's a lot of mixed race people.

That I think is something we can export. And also, I think, the the caring for the land. And I don't think this is unique to Hawaii, but we could certainly join hands with everyone else in the world who's who's appreciating their or terroir and, wanting to take it back from this kind of dependence on agribusiness as if, like, we we, you know, as if we can't feed ourselves, we have to go to the supermarket and buy something that was packaged. And it's like, no, we don't have to. And so I think that's something that Hawaii could lead in, if we chose to.

And there are a lot of people who are really excited about relocalizing, you know, food production and food security in Hawaii. And I think that's like a just hugely important positive movement. And then Charles, my last question is, you said you usually find something that's interesting or what you're writing on. What specifically are you what's your latest or kind of focuses right now? I'm really interested, and a broad topic is, the modern mythologies that we live by and that we, don't even understand our mythologies.

We think they're real, but they're they're they're just as mythological as the Greek gods. The source for my starting to think about this was this French philosopher, Roland Barthes, who wrote about modern mythologies, I believe, in the fifties and certainly in the sixties seventies. And so I think the whole idea that technology is wonderful and it's gonna just sort of endlessly supply us with more comfort and convenience and all the good things in life. I think that's a mythology. And I think the finance is a mythology, really.

And so, and even the state, you know, the nation state, the government, I think that in itself is a mythology too. So I'm interested in in exploring that kind of thinking and that that what would we what mythology would we create for the 21st century instead of just using a bunch of mythologies from past centuries? What would we what mythology could we create that that was actually fit the goal of a sustainable global economy as opposed to a waste is growth landfill economy. So that that's, and, of course, I'm always inspired by self reliance. You know, like, what can people do for themselves?

And how do they minimize their dependence on a, like, an unhealthy, unsustainable system. Those are, I think, my two interests at the moment. And then, Charles, how can people find you? Or what's the best way for people to reach you? Yeah.

Just visit me at of2minds.com. That's just, spelled like it is. No dots, no dashes. Just one word of 2 minds.com, and then there's all my archives of the blog posts. I think there's about 4,000 of those.

And then sample chapters of my book and bits and pieces of of other stuff. And so, yeah, just, visit of 2 minds.com and look around. And then, hopefully, you won't be too, annoyed. And then, Charles, I'll give you the final anything else you wanna share? Well, Robert, I just wanna compliment you on on the, the breadth of your interest and your guests, and I feel really honored to be included in your list of of of podcast guests.

All of whom, I would say, are unconventional in a in the positive way of they're, authentically pursuing themselves and they're and that is contributing good things to the world. And and you are contributing good things to the world by by sharing all these people's, experiences and insights. And so I I just I can't credit you enough, but I will that's what I wanna say is, for doing what you do. Oh, great. Well, thank you very much, Charles.

I really appreciate that, and I'm happy you took some time to talk to me. I really do.

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And so, really, everything I'm writing about is is is to try to return to what whatever's authentic and and has integrity. I think that's the the the wealth of life. I think it's been what, 6, 7 months since we last talked. Yeah. And I've enjoyed just the diversity of your guests on Leafbox.

And I'm I'm always heartened and and amazed by the variety of of people you find. And and that itself amazes me because, you know, it's it's hard to find people that are outside of sort of, like, the the funnel that we're fed. I I think we can talk about that that funnel later in the conversation. Thank you for your positive feedback. Yeah.

A lot of listeners of our first podcast emailed me saying, hey. When are you gonna do a second with Charles? And I thought that would be a good time to reconnect. So I appreciate you doing this. Well, Charles, I I think I wanted to start actually with a positive note.

I just saw your email this morning on the doom doom loop in cities across the US and the west. But before we go there, I really wanted to I really took to heart that quote you wrote that it's better to have a 30 person network than a 30 room bunker. So maybe we can start there. And what motivated that essay? And Well, thank you for bringing that topic up.

And I think, like everything else I'm interested in or try to write about multilayered. And and I think perhaps the the core foundational layer of that essay is, the idea that there's authenticity and that our authenticity in the way we live has been eroded in in ways that it's hard for us to even notice. The idea of community, like so many other things, it's a word, and it's an idea, and it's it's been watered down or co opted in into something that's essentially meaningless. So you see this many references to community. You know?

Like, well, we're we're helping our community and and and exactly what does that mean. And so it turns out that it's been it's become an abstraction in in in so many ways. And for so many people, What I was kind of aiming for in that essay is the idea of, like, well, let's reestablish what authentic community means. And what it means is there are 30 people who care about you in some way. Now they may not even know your name.

They you may they may just wave to you as neighbors, but you're connected through a network, people who do care about each other and are willing to do something, some take some action to express that caring. And then that's another degradation of of authenticity that we've we've had this idea that social media and somebody clicking on the like button, somehow a substitute for real community. And not not to say that there isn't a some sort of community in social media, but it's not a replacement for the kind of often authenticity, you know, an authentic community. I wonder, you know, living in the big island, have you heard of Zuckerberg's Kauai projects? Yeah.

And in, and in fact, that is what motivated me to write about the 30 room bunker is, is Mark Zuckerberg's bunker that he's building on Kauai. Yeah. For listeners, could you maybe summarize what he's doing and what you think the flaws or benefits of his project are or some of the dynamics in Hawaii and how that influences your writing? Yeah. Well, that's a great topic, and I don't claim to be an expert.

I I don't live on Kauai. I have visited a few times. But I think the way I would contextualize what Zuckerberg and other billionaires are doing, if we go back in time, several generations, we can say, well, there was always wealthy people and there was always working class people and a middle class, you know, that that had more security than the working class and so on. All of this was already present. So we we think that there's a continuity between the present and the past because of this sort of basic class structure still exists.

And that's not actually the case. There there the continuity has been broken. And and what used to happen generations ago was a wealthy family would come in from the mainland and they would buy a beachfront property and build, you know, some nice house. Right? That this was the standard model.

Now the billionaire class doesn't just have a beachfront property or a mansion. They're buying 100 or 1000 of acres of land that has been removed from the local economy. Now they can make claims that they're protecting it from development and so on and so forth. And some of these ideas or or claims may actually have some validity. Right?

Because the billionaire doesn't need to build a 1,000 condos to support paying $400,000,000 for the property. But doesn't really describe the dynamic what's changed, which is the billionaire now has tremendous leverage over not just the political system, because of course they have the money to buy influence. They also own big chunks of the actual island. And in in this sense, it's sort of like going back to the days of the big five, referring to 5 large corporations that owned significant chunks of whatever private land was available, and they were the dominant political influences in the pre state economy and and, you know, say up to the 19 sixties or so. And so the billionaire class is not even a corporation, it's individuals.

And so and I think it's very indicative of their mindset. Zuckerberg, the other billionaires in the class seek to create bunker fortress mentality as if they understand they're hated and loathed, and they're on the wrong side of history. Fortress, physical fortress to protect themselves from the outside world, catching on to their game, so to speak. And so this is remarkably divergent from, like, a real community. In other words, like it is it it's almost like difficult for us to imagine a billionaire who chose to live in a community.

Obviously, they'd have to have security guards because they can't have their kids kidnapped for ransom and that kind of thing. They do. They their visibility creates certain barriers, but they could in fact live at a scale very similar to the rest of us. And they could contribute to their local community by not buying huge chunks of the island and not, you know, exerting political controls. And and yet they choose not to do that.

And so this is what makes it different from the old days, I think. And so to kind of repeat the idea that community can be authentic, the idea is that if community is just based on a bunch of a hierarchy of money and and how many layers of protection there is between you and and the rest of the populace. I I don't think I think that's the antithesis of community. The actual community is the people who live around the edges of Zuckerberg's empire, who are trying to make a living on an island that is increasingly dominated by short term vacation rental ownership where the money goes somewhere other than the island of Kauai, and and and all the negative effects of that kind of exposure to global capital. Like, all of the islands of Hawaii are limited in in in in space, and the population is limited, and our biosphere is limited.

And then this is now for sale, essentially, on one level or another to global capital, which has access to essentially 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, you know, aggregate. And so there's no way that the local community can muster up, at least at the capital level, any sort of equivalency to what global capital can do. They they can access literally 3, 400 $1,000,000 without any problem at all. How do we how do we deal with this? And it's like, we don't have a lot of tools because capital is mobile, and it's fluid.

So capital flows around the world with a few keystrokes. But we, as humans and as laborers, as workers, we're we're we're in one place in the world, and we can move that place, but at enormous expense and effort. And so those of us who are trying to, you know, who who look at people, the residents as as the core of community, then it's like, well, what's being lost in in in ceding ownership to the billionaire class? And how does that impact our ability to to to care about our own neighbors? And so sort of to summarize, I think when push comes to shove in in a in a social crisis, it's really, you're more protected by having people who care about you and are willing to make some sacrifices on your behalf than your ability to hire armed guards and and set a perimeter, like like basically a base camp in Iraq.

Charles, have you read the book survival of the richest? I think it's by Douglas Ruckoff. He he writes his book about the escape fantasies of, quote, tech billionaires. I haven't read the book, but I've read his essays on it. And I've I've had a podcast with with Douglas.

I I admire him a lot, but, yeah, I'm familiar with his his thesis and and how he was consulted. Yeah. I I think when your essay, you wrote about it. I mean, you know, you were one of the Flatlanders when you grow up. And in Kauai, I always think about if something really were to happen, I mean, his compound would be raided very quickly.

And it's funny because in the in the Douglas Ruckoff book, he talks about how billionaires, they strategize all day trying to figure out how to control their guards from mutiny. So it's a very interesting dynamic, and I, you know, I just wanna take listeners. Yes. The 30 people you know seems more valuable than, you know, having 30 homes or whatnot at this point, you know, if you're really worried about a a a collapse scenario. Well, you you, picked up on those themes and wrote, I thought, a beautiful and and moving commentary about your experience with community gardens as a real world example of how community work.

And and what I found so interesting was not only the attention to the the beautiful aspects of community gardens and the sharing, but you also mentioned the fact that things are messy. You know, people have different views of what should be in the garden and and and, you know, human life, is messy. And in communities, we we understand this, and we, there's give and take. And and what we find when we when we lose the real community, authentic community, and we we've we've substituted a digital form, then disagreement gets you more likes, and you get more audience and therefore more income by being more disagreeable rather than being, like, more flexible. And as as we do when we actually deal with people on a day to day real world basis, you know, in other words, there's give and take in the community garden.

And what I think of as community is, another layer of it is is if you're a productive person in any way, shape, or form, and I don't mean necessarily making money. I mean, being productive in doing something useful in human life. This can be taking care of elderly people, taking care of children. This can be raising food in your your yard or your community garden. It can be able, being able to help somebody, you know, fix their, you know, technical problem.

And there's lots of levels of productivity. But if you're able to create a surplus, that then you can share with other people without any concern for what you're getting back. You you know, there's not your livelihood. You you you don't have to enter the market where there's a price and a a cost and, you know, supply and demand. And, you know, you can leave all that aside because I think the market in itself is like another form of distortion that we've we've lost sight of.

Is that now a part of neoliberalism as a general view of capitalism and the way the world should work or does work is the idea that everything becomes better if we can turn it into a market in which there's a price for everything, and everything becomes a commodity that could be traded globally. Then there's supply and demand, and then those gain and profit are the become the core motivator, incentive, and measure of everything. And so if you can leave all that aside and just say, I have extra food that I've grown. And here, let me find somebody in around where I live or my friends or family who can use it. And if and if I can't find somebody that can use it directly, find somebody who can give it to somebody they know.

In other words, the extended network. And we talk about in sociology, they use, like, strong ties and weak ties to describe our social connections, the power of weak ties. In other words, people that the people that your friends and family and neighbors know, you might know them without really knowing them. In other words, you wave to them. You say hi to them when you see them at your neighbor's house and and or you've heard their name.

You know, you know the connection of your cousin to this person. But that's those people actually turn out to be quite important in our lives. And in other words, even the person that you wave to on your morning walk or the the the guy selling hot dogs on the corner or whatever, even if they're not personal, intimate friends, we we actually gain a tremendous amount of social stability, mental health, if you will, from having that extended network. And that's part of the community that we've kind of lost, I think, because we're staring at our phones and and screens all the time. To kind of wrap that up, the idea that you that community is creating a surplus and sharing it with other people, and the reciprocity is voluntary.

We're not demanding a price. It's not a market transaction. I think that's the core of community, non market transactions where you're giving freely because you wanna share what you have or you wanna help somebody. And then they wanna respond and reciprocate. And if they don't, if they're incapable of responding, like they're they're blind to the reciprocity of community, then eventually people give up on them and they become isolated.

So you have to you have to reciprocate. And and and that's what community is too, reciprocity. But it's all voluntary. It's not like there's a market transaction or we think of it as some market transaction that doesn't happen to have any money. No.

It's not a market transaction at all. So, Charles, maybe jumping up a layer, you know, we're at the community garden where, you know, you can easily meet 30 people and give back and forth. Let's jump to your essay that you just published today on the doom loops of cities and what your thesis is there and how that might offer a contrast or how you look at that problem. Yeah. That's a that's a great topic, and I appreciate you allowing me to talk about it.

In a similar way, I think we're talking about impact of finance and and markets and the way that it distorts our individual lives, and and it distorts large structures in such as cities. This, I think what I was trying to describe in in talking about the doom loop was there's a an idea that there's, like, a natural economy, and and people can describe it in very many ways. You can talk about it as early capitalism, or there was commerce long before we we say, you know, capitalism emerged, but there was commerce in, you know, 3000 BC. Right? There was a very active commerce in the bronze age, you know, several 1000 years BC.

And so I think what we're talking about with cities is there was a there's a natural purpose for cities. We can trace that very easily to just geography and transportation, like cities arose on conjunctions of rivers or when where rivers met a sea or a lake, and then there's a bay or a harbor. And they they were conducive to trade and and becoming centers of commerce, which would be manufacturing. It would be warehousing and all the ancillary elements of of those sort of core economic functions of human life. Right?

And so the question is, is do cities fulfill those roles now or not? And there's 2 primary influences to that. 1 is, of course, technology, which has emptied out some of the the the value of cities as places where physical activity takes place. So in other words, people don't have to go to the office anymore. So then, therefore, they they update they're not gonna buy lunch.

The businesses in the business district. Right? So there's there's that element. But there's also what we call financialization, which is that the dominance of finance over everything else in our lives. And this this is a process that, again, like like the sort of erosion of community, it's occurred without us really noticing.

Like, most people just take it for granted that finance dominates every decision. Like every decision, whether it's political, economic, or social, it all boils down to, well, where's the money coming from? Who controls it? What's the rate of interest? Is there free money for some class and and not free money for some other class?

And, like, how do we profit from the sort of flow of finance? And so cities seem to seem to me and, to have become their core function is now just as, mechanisms of of finance. In other words, the city finances, you know, draws its income from the the flow of capital. And so that it it doesn't there's no manufacturing in American cities to speak of anymore, and there's really not much warehousing either. I mean, the the Amazon distribution centers are spread around, and they're close to transportation hubs, but those are not necessarily in cities anymore because cities are expensive.

So you build your distribution center out someplace in the middle of nowhere. What's the core function of the city? And the answer that's being told by the civic leaders and pundits is essentially entertainment. In other words, you're gonna you live in a city because it's entertaining. There's nightclubs, and and you can buy it.

You can have delivery, you know, in your in your to your apartment, you know, with security, you know, so you don't have to worry about street crime or anything because you're behind a protected wall, and then there's the delivery service gets in, but nobody else does. And so and fine dining and, you know, culture. And it's all like, well, certainly cities have always been concentrations of political power because the leaders had to meet somewhere. Right? So Rome was the center of the empire.

Now it was a it was a distributed empire, meaning that it had nodes, other many of the cities in the Roman Empire were political centers of power where the leadership gather. Right? Whether it's secular or religious or political, but the leadership met in person. This was required. Right?

Now that's not the case, but it's the cities were always a center of political power and then financial power because the money was stored there, and the money changed hands there. And it was a a physical you know, the physical wealth. In other words, this was where all the all the goods were stored and distributed from here. So if the cities don't perform any of those functions, then what's left? And then what's left is when you read sort of the current media is entertainment.

Well, it's it's just more fun to live in the city. And and so you go, okay. That's legitimate. You know, humans like fun. They like novelty.

They like that personal interaction of being in a restaurant or a nightclub or going to a a theater. All those are valuable, but is that enough to support a city which is an enormously expensive operation? And so that's that's the question I'm I'm raising. And I don't have an answer, except I don't think that fine dining condominiums with delivery services. I don't think that's enough to to support a city.

And I don't really think that's the core ideal of what a city is. But I'm not sure we have a substitute once the city loses its economic foundational purpose or that those diminish to to the point where there there's a container harbor with its highly automated, and so there's a few 100 jobs where there used to be tens of 1,000. Is that enough to support the whole region? You know? A a few 100 jobs in a container port?

I don't I don't think so. That's an open question, I guess. One of the topics I mean, there's 2 questions I have. Are you familiar with Randall O'Toole's, the anti planner? He writes a lot about these issues about urban planning and actual individual choices.

So my question I have asked is, where do you think people should live then? Do you want them do you are you recommending they go to more rural places to keep living in cities? What kind of individual takeaway from your role? Should they get on the planning commission? Should they actively escape the city, try to improve the city?

What do you offer as advice to individuals? Yeah. That's a great question. And I'm gonna, again, try to answer it on a couple different levels. I think one of the issues with cities is that the global mobility of capital and and talent is it's a dual edged sword.

I've had readers, reader tell me, well, this is the, the era of the supremacy of the individual. In in that, a a talented, ambitious, credentialed, or knowledgeable individual can can go in around the world. They could, they have a lot of options about where they're gonna physically work or live because they have this skillset that's valued by the sort of tech finance rulers or, you know, masters of the universe. And so as individuals, they they don't need a community or a city per se, and so their interest in it is is, like, therefore, abstract and and very shallow. In other words, you can fly in to any major city in the world, and there's a view and and generally, there's a beautiful airport, you know, if it's a developed world.

And you, you know, you get off and you have all the same services. You know, it's called, you know, Uber in the US and, something else in China and something else in Thailand and so on. But it's it's like global capital has kind of may homogenize the entire world in a lot of ways. And so if you're just a individual that's, thrilled to go live in Shanghai for a few months, a year, then you go back to New York, or you have your haven in the Caribbean or whatever. And and I'm not denigrating these people.

I mean, in a way, I'm I'm living that life too. You know, I have skills that allow me to work remotely. End of story. I I mean, so I have to be careful not to be too hypocritical, but it's sort of like, where are you in the world that you're gonna wanna contribute to the civic life? If you're if you're just there for a few months or a year or whatever, and then you're off to the next homogenized globe capital.

And then so I think that and and it's not just the remote workers flitting around the world. It's also true even in, like, the continental US that people move a huge amount now. You know, that that that you're constantly being moved around to advance your career. You know? And so then people are are, like, quote, stuck someplace because they're they can't leave because their spouse's health insurance is is is the only insurance they can get.

And if they quit, they might they they have no health care coverage, which is a catastrophe in and of itself in the United States. Or that their mortgage is that they've got a 3% mortgage, and they they they can't sell because then they'd have to pay 7% and they can't afford it. So there's this this whole mix of, like, who's mobile and who's stuck. And and if the people are mobile, either by either forced to be mobile to be constantly moving around because their corporation shifted there, or they closed their headquarters in Seattle and moved it to Chicago or whatever, then how do you keep any civic ties? How do you how do you have the time, energy, or caring to, like, contribute to the the kind of thing you mentioned, like being on the planning commission or something.

It's like, well, you can't. And then the way that work has dominated, again, part of the whole thing of of, like, the dominance of finances is like work now dominates people's lives in ways that we've lost track of. That by the time you get back from work or whether you finally turn the screen off at home, you're drained. You're you're you're you're physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically drained by what was demanded of you to keep your job or be productive in, in a market economy. So what do you have left to give to anything in your community or city?

And it's turns out for many people that it's like nothing. So they're like passive observers of of what goes on around them. So there's that element. And so then the the civic energy requires people to be permanent or or semi permanent. They need to have lived there long enough to care about it.

Or ideally, the traditional model would be they've lived there for 3 generations. You know? Their grandparents and their parents, and they live in the same city or neighborhood. Right? And so if you if you lose all that, if it's eroded by all these different forces, including unaffordability, like now the young people can't even afford to own a a home in most of urban America.

Well, then what kind of population do you have? And and if they have nothing left to contribute to the city, well, then the then city's lost something intangible that's core to its its, existence. So there's that element. And then I I also wanna mention you've you've probably seen these statistics. I just saw something that said 7,000,000 people in in the new in the Greater New York City era area wanna leave.

And then the the number in the San Francisco Bay area is something like with I I'm I'm guessing I read 40% on a move. It might have even been higher, might have been 60%. Some some enormous percentage of the population is dissatisfied. And at least in their fantasies would like to move. And so then you go, well, where are you gonna move these millions of people?

You know? And so then then then we then we look back at history and we go, well, what happened over the last 100 years or 200 years? Well, what happened is people that lived in rural communities moved to cities because that's where the jobs were. And that's still the case. Right?

As a general rule, the urban metropolitan areas are well are where the wealth and the jobs concentrate. And so there's lots of abandoned or hollowed out villages in Japan, in Italy, in France and in the US 1000, thousands of villages and small towns have been hollowed out, right, as people left because they they they couldn't make a living there, You know? And so, again, the dominance of finance and then agriculture, which used to be the foundation of human life is now, like, literally 1% of the jobs in America are related to agriculture or 2%. You know? And then 40% have to do with finance and another 40% have to do with digital transactions, essentially.

Charles, you seem critical of Yeah. I guess, what I would call the global managerial class that doesn't have strong ties? You know, you don't seem to write much about migration, let's say, at the other end of the economic ladder and how that affects, you know, the housing stock? Or do you find those forces the same forces, the financialization? They just want more labor to lower costs?

And, I mean, a Marxist lens would be that they want more immigration to lower the cost of labor and then to increase you know, with a limited supply of housing, then you're actually increasing the price of the housing stock. So I'm just curious. You don't seem to write much about migration in your essays. So I'm curious what you think about it and how it affects these forces and kind of the social ties and things. Yeah.

Actually, I I think, that's a very good point, and I don't mean to sound negative about migration or immigration. I think what, I think what I'm foreseeing is that as as we saw, like, the migration from rural to urban because of the forces of of money, essentially, at work, then we might see a reverse, migration, smaller towns and cities that might have more affordable housing and might have a better quality of life, which is, of course, the whole selling point of the city. Set aside the economic functions of a city and just look at the benefits and costs of living in a city. The benefits are the cultural richness and the opportunities for entertainment and community and all that gatherings and the cultural opportunities in a city are higher than in, the countryside. And so there may be a migration driven by seeking a better balance between, like, these extremely large metropolitan areas and smaller cities that that have some cultural benefits and some liveliness, but that they don't have the same costs as the megalopolis is.

Migration is is is sort of a core freedom in human life. In other words, you vote with your feet. I think that that's kind of what we're we may be witnessing is is we people voted with their feet to leave the village and the town because they wanted there was more opportunity in the big city. So over the last 100 years, then the the the population of the developed world and the under and the developing world both have concentrated in the in the cities. And now these dynamics that we're discussing may lead to a a reversal of that migration that cities may lose population as people seek a better balance, like a place where they can afford to buy a house and yet still have the benefits of of an urban environment.

So is your advice sent to individuals to just move with their feet or what do you advise them then? Because if they have strong ties to, say, San Francisco or Los Angeles, but what what's the solution for that? Yeah. And I don't, you know, I'm I'm very wary of giving advice other than what what seems abstract or general. But each person's situation is so complex and complicated that it it's each person has to make up their own mind.

And so my advice is just to kind of focus on how do you regain as much control as you can over your own life. And and this is the core of of of what I term self reliance. I talk about self reliance, and it's often confused in in in many people's minds with with self sufficiency. Like, they think, I mean, you should have a homestead and live off the land, etcetera. That may be part of a solution for you, but it may not.

And so self reliance is is not necessarily self sufficiency. It's more like taking back the control, over our lives that's been lost to a lot of different things, technology and finance being 2. And so however you can regain control over your life, then that's what I would recommend. If that may be staying exactly where you are, it may just be changing other things in your life, possibly even just the intangible parts of your life. Or it could mean deciding that the balance of life between risk and return and cost and benefit no longer favors where you are.

And so then you you you're forced to move. And where to move becomes like a challenge, of course. And and what we see, we see these these shifts in population as people make up their own minds what works best for them. So since you and I both live in Hawaii, we can use Hawaii as an example. Hawaii has been losing population, and there is now more native Hawaiian people, people with native Hawaiian ethnic backgrounds in Las Vegas than there is in the state of Hawaii.

At least this is what we've been told because you can buy a house, you can afford a house in Las Vegas and there's there's jobs, entertainment, and lodging, hospitality sector. So that's been an out migration that's totally individually controlled. Like, there is no state agency or mandating that people move to Vegas. It's it's totally driven by the the forces that have made housing unaffordable in Hawaii for non wealthy residents. And and then then there's this other migration, which is like wealthy remote worker types who are coming to Hawaii because they are rich enough.

They can they can afford to buy a house and then they can make money here in the global market economy. They're they're not limited to what the the the actual physical jobs in in Hawaii. So these these are examples of the kind of migration that are occurring that that as people try to figure out what works for them. And I can tell you that here on the big island, that the district of Puna, the big island is of course the largest island by far. And there are 1,000 and 1,000 of of lots, undeveloped, you know, housing lots that were subdivided in the sixties without paved roads or utilities.

And so there's a lot of, let land on the big island that you can still buy a lot for, like, $20,000. And if you're handy or you have friends, you can build some kind of really modest shelter there. And so it's or you can buy a regular house that'll and and it'll be worth 300,000 or 400,000. In this state, that's dirt cheap. Right?

And so people are flooding into Puna because it's the only that's the last place in the in in the entire state where a normal household can afford to buy a house. And so what's happening is that there's tens of thousands of new residents over the course of, let's say, the last 20 years in Puna, and it's still served by a 2 lane roads. And so it's created this urban congestion in a non urban setting. And so I'm just mentioning all of these dynamics are in play. And and I again, my only recommendation to people is enhance your self reliance and control of your own life and destiny by whatever means you have available and whatever works for you.

Charles, one of the great advice I took from one of your other essays is about the concept of going gray, and I think that's a a good point to kind of bounce off your just what you just said about the big island. Could you expand on your concept of what you mean by going gray? And I guess you could term it as local averaging versus surrender and how that fits into your concept of self reliance. Yeah. Thank you for that question because I I wrote about going gray, and it's a it's a concept that's been around for a while.

It was called gray man, which, of course, we we, I don't wanna favor it gray person. I mean, I don't know. You know, it's like so just going gray means anybody, not just, just men. And so the idea is that you blend in, and so you don't get a target on your back by driving a luxury car and and going to your gated community or your bunker. Because as you pointed out, if things get dicey, flagrantly displaying the fact that you're wealthy and have all kinds of neat stuff that can be stolen, that's not necessarily a wise policy unless you wanna be a target.

Most people don't. So there's that element. And and the idea of we're living in a a total spectrum. Yeah. We can call it like a full spectrum surveillance society in which corporations and the government sort of both and together as one system are constantly monitoring and collecting data on us digitally.

And so we we there's various forms of this. I mean, China has its social credit system with, you know, millions of cameras on every, you know, light pole and so on. So, you know, they they've they've, centralized it in in the hands of the government. In the US, it's kind of split between corporations who are constantly collecting data on you, whether you are aware of it or not, and then that's being shared or sold to the government. The idea being, if you wanna just not stick out and become a target for controls might be exerted, then you just wanna look average.

So you drive an average looking car, and and I joke that, you know, you post photos of kittens and puppies on your Facebook page and, you know, that kind of thing. It's like you just look like everybody else. And so it's it's partly like a survival technique, if you will. I was criticized or some readers said, well, you're telling me to be passive. And, no, I'm not gonna do that.

I'm gonna fight for my rights and, you know, the constitution. And I I didn't I I failed to explain myself well enough that I didn't mean to be passive, in in saying going gray. It's more like go local as as you as you intuitive. You know? It's like turn your activity into into, like, your local community, like, where you physically are, and do what you can there to regain control of your life as opposed to getting involved in high profile conflicts, if you will.

That that, you know, your efforts might make you a target, but they may not actually help solve the problems that you're concerned about. And so it's we're much more likely to have some effect in in in our local community. And and, so that that's kind of what going gray means to me. Now other people have other interpretations. It's interesting how you you tie the surveillance economy and the control mechanisms to local self reliance as a way to surrender.

Do you ever what what are your thoughts about anonymity? You know, I interviewed a a writer recently who's anonymous, and he chooses to be anonymous because he has more freedom. Have you ever considered using a pen name? Or how do you do you feel like there's a censorship of what you potentially write? Or how are you going gray, and are there limits to how far you can go in that?

I think it's a very it's a very important topic. Let's, again, let's contextualize it by going back a bit when the Internet started in the late nineties. Now we know it started back in 19 69 with the ARPANET and so on. But for the average person, it became available in in, like, the mid to late nineties with 14 4 modems, and we were all thrilled when we moved to 288. And so people got on AOL and all this kind of thing.

The the mass of people moving on to the Internet really occurred around the late nineties to the early 2000, and this was the wild west of the web. In other words, people did searches, and there were many search engines, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, so on and so forth. And the idea was that you would go and do web searches, and you would go to individual sites. We didn't call them blogs. They were just websites, right, that were hosted by organizations, individuals, companies, whatever.

And so you did your own searching online. Now what happened was that the development of of Facebook and Google and Apple and so on, that the tech monopolies or quasi monopolies have created these platforms that are now we're all funneled into. So people don't really do what we would call organic searching anymore. What happens is they go to platforms. They go to x, you know, Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube.

And then if they go to a search engine, for example, Google, or if you're on Amazon, you're gonna search for something on Amazon. The links are all sponsored, which means that people that individuals or companies are paying these tech monopolies for placement. And where it used to be back in the early days, you would go to Amazon and you would do a search for some product or a book. The search would be what Amazon thought had had its algorithms had chosen as the closest to what you were looking for. Now you have to scroll through 4 pages of sponsored links to get to anything that was so called organic.

Right? And the same is true of Google. That Google used to refer to websites, and now it provides its own answers. Right? So that that you stay glued to them, and then they get money from that.

And so this this raises all sorts of interesting ethical issues as well. Also contextualize it that modern cars and I don't know. I can't state exactly what year it is began, but, the the cars that are manufactured today collect data on your driving. And not just your location, but your braking and on, your basic driving mechanisms. And they send this.

They transmit this data to the car's manufacturers who then sell it to insurance companies who because it helps them decide whether they should raise your insurance, that if you're driving erratically, they will discover this and then they can raise your your rates. And so there are various opt in policies that are like this. In other words, State Farm, for example, monitoring your car, you get a 10% discount. Right? But you don't the data is being collected.

You don't opt in or opt out. You you opted in when you bought the car. And so there's lots of data being collected that you can question whether you're anonymous. And so it's it's it turns out that, really, you have to cut off all Internet access. You know, you'd have to, like, have no Internet access and have a burner cell phone, and then you could pretty much not be tracked.

You're still using utilities, you know, so so, you know, it it's it's almost like, is it at what point do you sacrifice more than you're willing to give up? And if and if you're gonna kind of try to balance it out, you never really get rid of being tracked. And so for instance, I have friends that have flip phones because they object to, you know, smartphones being like basically surveillance devices. But then they'll stay, they'll watch, YouTube videos on conspiracy theories and music videos and so on for 4 hours a day. Well, isn't YouTube tracking them and their IP address?

Well, of course it is. And isn't that data being sold and distributed just like the data from Facebook? And it's all like, yes. It is because YouTube's owned by Google. And so it, you know, it raises all these questions like exactly what are we trying to get away from, And and how much are we willing to do in a in a full spectrum surveillance system?

And so I it it's like, we all end up being hypocrites. I mean, that's that's where it's come to to some degree. Like, in other words, you can say, you know, well, Charles, you're objecting to the full spectrum, you know, surveillance state, but you're using the Internet to distribute your ideas. So aren't you part of the matrix? And then the answer is, well, yes.

I am. And it's like, well, why is that? You're a hypocrite. And I go, well, what what other means do I have left now? I can print a flyer.

And I can take it out to the corner, and I and I can pass it out to the few pedestrians that might walk by. I mean, what what other option do I have outside of the matrix? And so if you say I'm gonna be anonymous, I'm gonna have a pin name or, is it really impossible for somebody to track you down? I'm I'm not sure. You know?

I I'm not I'm not an expert in that. But they're collecting data on you one way or the other unless you have literally no digital presence. And then you're silent. And so there's a trade off there. So if every one of us who's an outsider or who objects to the system or has some other idea of of the right way to live.

If if we're gonna cut ourselves off, well, then we we go silent. And so then is that really a a positive for us in society? I'm I can't tell you that there's there's a right way or an ethical way to deal with this. I it's like, again, it falls back onto every individual. If somebody feels safer or they feel that their quality of life is higher by some level of anonymity, I would say, yeah, go for it.

I mean, a lot of people use, they don't wanna use Gmail or the regular email because they want it encrypted and so on. And so it that's that's perfectly fine, but I don't think it's changing the the the nature of how we live. You, you know, that, that adjustment is always gonna be partial unless you literally cut yourself off from the internet entirely. Yeah. The irony is the more you cut yourself off, the more you're being you're drawing attention to yourself.

It's interesting. I interviewed a, member of Extinction Rebellion. They're a pretty extremist environmental group, and their policy in regarding operational security is to do everything in the open. The more open, the less they think they're watched. It's pretty interesting, especially because their groups are penetrated by intelligence agencies and whatnot.

So they almost think the more out in the open they do everything, then it's almost like they're more, like you said, going gray. They're just kind of floating behind it in the mass of everything, which is an interesting regardless of your opinions on their anarchist type movements, but it's an interesting strategy. Do you ever not like, how far is your Overton window in your writing? I mean, is there you know, you said your friends were conspiratorial. Some of the topics you talk about lend into the conspiratorial.

So where is your limits? Or where are there things you're just not interested in? Or where do you do you limit yourself? Or have you been censored? Or what are your experiences with the surveillance state in that sense?

Yeah. I think that's a great question, and thank you for asking it. I was shadow banned in 2016. I was put on this completely fake list that was page 1 Washington Post. I think it was called Prop or Not.

In other words, what were were these sites propaganda sites for Russian intelligence or not? And then they just threw in a couple of 100 of of, like, the those of us in the alternative media and basically branded us as as propagandists. And so and then that that affected my traffic and stuff. And, I think there's other evidence. People have sent me screenshots of, like, Department of Commerce sites where they were trying to go through to my site at work in, at, in a federal agency.

And it was, and that my site was blocked as dangerous. So there's and, of course, the whole beauty of shadow banning is if you're shadow banned on a site like Facebook, you're not gonna know that that no one can see your post. You see it, so you think everybody, all your friends, and everything can see it. But no. They they they allow you to see your post, but then you don't know whether anybody else is is able to see it or not.

So the this this calls brings up another topic of related, which is self censorship. And I think that's just part of what you're you're asking about is once we realize that we're we're being surveilled and that access to our site, our posts might be limited because we're not we're outside the official Overton window. Then then we start going well. If you really push too hard, you get demonetized. And in in other words, that's another element here we're talking about.

Those of us who derive any income from being online and and and having commentary or podcasts or videos, well, then if they kick you off the platform that you depend on for your money, then you're you're now broke. So you are have been eliminated as a threat, not just digitally, but now you're struggling to pay your bills. So it's a pretty big hammer. If you can demonetize your opponents or, you know, so called threats that removes them much more profoundly than just, like, cutting off their digital account, which they can open on Rumble or some other site. Right?

So once you've taken away their income, you've really crippled them. So that's happened to a lot of peep and, because once, you know, people used to make quite a bit of money on YouTube, for example, or off advertising, Well, the platforms took most of the money. You know, like, where people used to make, like, a couple $1,000 a month in advertising revenues, and then the platforms took most of that away in the last decade. So now they get maybe a couple $100 or, you know, you you read these stories where you get a million downloads on a music site and and, you know, your royalty check is like $17. And so it's that that's part of self censorship is whatever you're using to make money is always at threat.

You know? Like, you can be banned or or dropped. And you're and when this happens to you, you're not told why. And this is the the kind of aspect of of full spectrum. Surveillance is they you're simply notified that you violated their, community rules or whatever they call it.

And you're not told exactly what you did to violate their rules, and you're not given any chance to contest that. Like, there's no quasi judicial thing where you get to say, wait a minute. I I wanna state my case. You know? I want, a review.

And so the whole this this was this is what makes it so Kafka f is that that that there's there's just layers of authority that you have no access to. And you don't even know who's in charge, but you have no access to who's decided that your sites violated the community rules. So this creates a an in an environment where if you're making money off of it, then you you do need to think about your, what happens if you out if you go outside the approved Overton window. I myself think more about what am I able to contribute. In other words, if I'm an am I am I an expert on something, or am I just another person with another opinion?

Everybody's got a right to post whatever they want. But if I'm trying to create value, then I've gotta have some something outside the normal kind of opinions that that get bantered around or get repeated as sort of conventional wisdom or unconventional wisdom. So I think I choose I try to choose topics about which if I'm not an expert, I feel that I have something different to say. A lot of what what people write about, I don't have any insight or expertise in that. So I I don't feel that I'm adding any value with some personal view, which might be really poorly grounded.

You know? So I try to write about things that I've read deeply about or thought deeply about or about personal experiences where, as somebody said, we're we're we are experts in our own experience. Charles, maybe we can jump for a second on when we first started the conversation, you said that some of my interviews are outside the funnel. Yes. What do you think about narrative control and psychological operations in terms of what is funneled up and what's funneled down?

I mean, you have the experience with the shadow banning. I find your writing pretty, I'm not gonna say vanilla, but it's it seems very in the middle of what's allowable in terms of critiquing the regime or critiquing society. So I'm actually surprised that you're shadow banned, but I guess some of your financial statistics might counter official numbers and whatnot. So I'm curious. My my two questions are, what do you think about just narrative control, if it's coming from corporate narrative control or governmental narrative control?

And secondly, how do you help navigate what's real in a post truth Internet hypernovel reality and how people can learn to actually read through the lines and things. Yeah. That's a wonderful topic post truth. It's again one of the degradations or decay of of what we once took for granted as legitimate or or authentic. And of course, we're when we talk about post truth, we we we often end up talking about science.

I majored in philosophy in university, but I I took, you know, a lot of math and science in high school. And if you sort of have a fundamental grasp of sort of the basics of of math and science, then you can learn and add on to that. In other words, it's not just what you learned in in high school or or university. Once you kind of grasp the scientific method and the way that statistics are acute, you know, gathered and and massaged, then you can add a tremendous body of of knowledge, you know, about science. And, and so that's that's kind of been my one of my life purposes is to add to the knowledge I I started with.

So in other words, if you learn the principles of of collecting data and the scientific method and what evidence there is and and and testing a hypothesis and and and all these elements, then you can apply those to all sorts of situations. And so and the same is true of philosophy in the sense that, you know, what is philosophy? Well, you can get a 1,000 answers, but I think philosophy is really an attempt to to structure thinking skeptically. In other words, really, the core of philosophy is to be a critical to learn to think critically as we say nowadays, which is to examine a proposal or a body of knowledge and ask what are its agendas, you know, what what are its foundational beliefs or or, claims, and then subject those claims to a rigorous analysis and and potentially criticism or look for elements that actually support it and so on. So this kind of critical thinking is what is is what when we lack it or we don't understand it, we don't know how to use those principles.

Then we become prone to being whipsawed by narrative control, as you say. And I I think that it's interesting because as we as we all as you mentioned, the conspiracy theories, we've we I my interest is, you know, sort of as kind of vanilla, if you will, to use your words in that there's there's clear proof of of of, conspiracy, such as like big tobacco obscured the fact that smoking was really unhealthy. And there's been also similar kinds of investigations of big agriculture colluding to price fix. And, you know, there's lots of lots of conspiracy things turn out to be true where there's a commercial interest and so on. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about, you know, the Bilderberg group or, you know, the World Economic Forum controlling, you know, the narrative control globally.

And I am skeptical of of that. All of our problems can be distilled down to the room with 12 evil people. You know? I I think that actually in the as as a general rule, humans respond in the in the very short term, just to kind of more or less keep everything glued together in the moment. And I I don't think that the leadership is really that far away from that con contingent kind of response.

And so a lot of narrative control in the tech world is simply the algorithms. Right? Somebody's tweak to the algorithm or reprogram the algorithm to eliminate, you know, hot button topics or things that are considered signs of, you know, fake news, etcetera, etcetera. And so in other words, I don't think that there's a master plan necessarily at work. I think that a lot of it is just people trying to keep everything glued together.

And so a lot of the narrative control boils down to that. Keyword locating keywords and deleting posts that have the keyword and looking for pornographic photos and deleting them and, you know, all this kind of automated stuff. So there's a lot of the narrative controls on that level that it's not really thoughtful. It's just automated. Right?

In terms of the the the higher narrative control, I think we've entered an era where artifice and manipulation are what are viewed by those who have the power, economically and politically as essential tools to keep the thing glued together. In other words, like, the narrative control that inflation is near 0 again, it's only 2 or 3 percent or it's, like, 3% and that the economy's growing wonderfully. This is a higher level narrative control that's clearly being scripted by human beings. Right? Now it may be enforced auto automated with automated tools, but it's it's it's it's originating in an agenda run by human beings who are trying to keep the thing glued together because they're they're obviously concerned that if if the official inflation statistic came out at what it really is, like 9% or something, that then people would panic and they they demand some action or, you know, that that the system might destabilize under their watch.

And so that's not what they want. So, therefore, they, you know, gin up these statistics. It's 3% and tell everybody everything's going great even though people's own experiences, their financial security's decaying. Their quality of life is eroding, etcetera, etcetera. So there's that level of of narrative control.

So how do we navigate that? I I kinda start with the the fundamentals, which is, well, you have to be a skeptic, and you have to have some preferably, some ability to think things through yourself rather than just be whip side from some claim that this is true, and then then somebody else comes out and say, no. That's fake news. And then you're you're you're whipsawed by all these different narratives, each of which is, like, designed to benefit somebody somewhere. Right?

So, you know, we ask, well, to whose benefit is it if I believe this or not? And so how do you navigate a post truth? Well, you just try to accumulate as much evidence as you can that that stands up to your own skeptical inquiry. And this, of course, takes a lot of energy, And it's a lot of it's energy that people don't necessarily have. And so then one way of of dealing with that is to just say, you know what, I'm gonna kind of shut off the media and focus on my own real life here because I I find, that this being whipsawed of all this, all these opinions and and claims about truth and untruth to to not actually be adding anything to my life.

In fact, it's it's, decaying and degrading my mental health. So to the to the to the degree that we don't control a lot of the issues that we're being inundated with, maybe the positive thing is to detach ourselves from the narrative control, focus on stuff we we can control. No. I think it's good. I mean, just go going back to your original self reliance point that just more local, more direct, more grounded in reality.

I mean, when you add in the layers of international narrative control, it just becomes so complicated. I mean, it's easy. I have friends in Venezuela, for instance, who have left Venezuela. And if you look at Venezuelan state media, you know, everything's going good and everything you know? And then you see the underground.

It's so obvious that the lies are there. Right? Because you can clearly understand the reality. But here in the west, you know, if the if the case of Ukraine or COVID or China, even the thing what you just said about the Chinese credit score system, even that is unknown if that how real that actually is. Because I talked to friends to Shanghai, and they're like, I don't know what you're talking about.

I've never had any experience with this, credit score system. And it almost seems like that's a narrative element from Western propaganda against China. I I have no real opinion because I don't face that system. But like you said, I think the the summary of the point is going back to the local, to the grounded. If the government says inflation's at 0, but you see the eggs going up, whatever, 10%, I think that's you know, you have to start asking questions.

Right? I wanted to ask what you thought, Charles, on your concept about tight, loose ambidextrty. You turned that in one of your essays on what's the road map for what's ahead. And I wanted to offer listeners maybe how do you look towards the future? How do you keep, I guess, philosophically ambiguous, and how do you move forward?

And what are you seeing the next kind of themes for the next few years in your analysis? Well, thank you for that. The idea of tight and loose cultures been around for quite a while. The idea being that cultures can can be tight in the sense that they demand obedience and with to, like, social mores and social rules, as well as obedience to authority. And then the loose culture has a broader sense of freedom of of social, like, what's socially acceptable, less strict compliance with authority.

And so the, studies that have been done sociologically have found that that that these these types of cultures, of course, are a spectrum. Right? There's not just one or the other. It's like, of course, a spectrum, but that it doesn't relate to geographics or to development, the the economic status of the country. Like, for if for the, the the paper I referenced or the article I referenced said that both Japan and Pakistan are tend to be on the tight culture end of the spectrum, even though they they're completely different in so many other ways.

And where the loose culture spectrum is more like the US and Brazil, which are completely different countries. Right? Different history. The idea being that cultures become tight as a means of surviving a lot of natural disasters or a lot of crises that that really demand cooperation of everybody to get through it. And then the looser cultures have fewer threats to their existence.

And so they can they can have a more individualistic approach. And and the cooperation is always more difficult or contested. Right? There's there's individual advocacy is the and individualism is the core of the looser cultures. Social acceptability is the core of the the tight cultures.

Right? You need to fit in, will not be approved of. The idea being that these these two types of cultures provide what we would might call, like, selected natural selection. They offer better or worse survival skills. Right?

In other words, each each loose and tight both offer advantages when faced with crisis or challenges or threats. And so the idea of ambidextry cultures is that if you can shift from a loose culture to a tight culture in crisis so that you you can create cooperation as opposed to just conflict, then you're going to get over the crisis more far more successfully. And then you can loosen back up. That that's being ambidextrous, if you will. Whereas if you just go down the road of tightening and it becomes a feedback loop for you, you know, those in authority keep tightening and tightening and tightening.

Like, the only thing they know how to do as things continue to fray or fall apart is impose even more centralized control, then you end up creating a feedback loop that's, like, not cooperative. It's more like then people start getting, they start dropping out or opting out or they they start resisting that that level of tightening or you can go looser and looser, and then you you lose the ability to cooperate on a mass scale at all. And so in other words, you just kind of devolve extremely localized communities, and there's no there's no cooperation at all at a larger scale. So I think that that's useful for us in a in a way that I would call scale and variant. Meaning that I think that mechanism is valuable on it from the individual level to the household, to the larger family, to the community, to the state, the city, or to the nation state.

You know? It works on all levels. So that even as individuals, we can see the in bad advantage of kind of tightening up and and sacrificing our own personal goals for the the good of the household, for instance. And then once we've overcome some crisis or challenge, then we can kind of loosen up and and go back to, you know, being able to focus on ourselves. So I think that in the larger scope of things, sympathetic to the analysts who say none of this matters.

The only thing that matters is energy and the biosphere. In other words, we we can dance around surveillance and and narratives and all that stuff, but it really boils down to how much energy do we have access to and at what price, and what and what is that doing to the biosphere? And so in that larger scope, we obviously need to use less of everything. And that that's like the essential goal of everything we're doing is is to is to have a high quality of life, what I call well-being, by using less of everything on a much, I mean, a massively less. In other words, not just we're gonna reduce usage by 2%, but we need to, like, use, like, half of what we're doing in terms of materials and energy.

And so and so from this point of view, people talk about, well, the elites and the, you know, are supposed to be the bad guys and all this, and the elites are are are not the issue. It's that we're running out of cheap energy at the level that we need to keep growing the economy globally. And that the more we grow the economy, the more we destroy the biosphere. And that that's the core issue of for humanity and that everything that's happening is a is a reflection of that. So resource wars, you know, social conflicts to decline in the quality of life, etcetera, etcetera, all really go I'll come back to that.

We can say in that in that sense, we need to cooperate at a level we haven't been able to achieve globally. Right? And how do we do that? And and ironically, perhaps one answer is we just try to lower our own footprint on the planet. Right?

In other words, we by by relocalizing our life, then we're actually lightening the the footprint of humanity because, you know, if we can grow our own food locally just to some degree, then it means we're we're we're we're using less energy to fly food 25 100 miles or 5000 miles and and that kind of thing. And so and the idea that this actually increases the quality of our life and our well-being, then then it's like, well, that's a win win win. Right? And so that's where relocalization seems to be an answer on multiple levels that we can actually participate in. You know, we we can't really influence whether the world can pump 95,000,000 barrels of oil a day or not or whether it slips to 85 or increases to a 100,000,000.

You know, we we don't really control that output, but but we can control what happens, you know, in our local communities to some degree. And so that's that's where it relocalization seems like the answer, to to multiple issues. I think, Charles, it comes back to your theme of just keep you know, the 30 people is the most important thing versus the 30 bunkers or whatnot because it's interesting because you're you're writing I I could imagine people on the right getting frustrated and mad because some of your arguments sound almost leftist. Right? They're, you know, degrowth, environmentalism.

These are all kind of leftist talking points. So I'm interested it's interesting how you jump between the left and right. I always appreciate that. You're just trying to be honest, I guess, with the problems and the challenges. But either if you are on the left or right, I guess the message is just more local, more control of your individual actions and reactions.

Charles, I don't wanna take too much of your time, but one of the things I was really interested in was why you write fiction. I only read 2 of your short stories, and there's another writer you probably know, James Kunstler, who writes fiction as well. And he writes a lot about financial collapse and collapse studies. And John Michael Greer also writes fiction. So I'm curious, why do you write fiction, and then what are you trying to do with it?

I think is there an optimism you're trying to model? Or what are you doing with your fiction, and how does that offer a contrast to your nonfiction work? Well, you you're asking a question that every writer loves to express themselves on. Right? I I and I I do admire the work of of Jim and and John Michael Greer, but I I have read some of of of Kunstler's, fiction.

I'm aware that Greer also writes fiction. I've read his nonfiction books. I think for I think it's a question that any creator can answer, whether it's a musician, podcaster, video artist, is you're drawn to you typically are drawn to both aspects of of of creation, like a documentarian kind of approach, if you will, And then the, the fictional expression of of some theme that that you wanna develop that that only fiction or that fictional art allows you to do. In other words, you could create characters out of thin air and have them face challenges and so on. And so I think one of the motivators for me was I've written a bunch of novels, and each one was an exploration of a different genre.

So I like, for instance, I wrote a book, to to to consulting philosopher. And and my idea was, well, I wanted to write a mystery. So, and because I like philosophy, then then I created this character who's a consulting philosopher, which of course is ludicrous. But it was a fictional way I could I could combine my interest in philosophy with, like, writing a mystery, which is a particular form and a challenge. Right?

So I've written romances, if you will, and, a road novel and an AI related sort of novel. And so I've written a bunch of different things, more self expression than anything else. But in terms of the development of myself as a writer and individual, each of these novels has given me a chance to develop or express some interest of mine that then gets fulfilled in writing the book. And I I presume it's the same for poets, filmmakers, documentarians. Everybody probably shares those those ideas or or values.

They wanna they wanna explore an idea that that fascinates them, and they wanna reach culmination or they wanna complete that that interest. Just the last question on the fiction writing. What's your approach to writing fiction, and how is it different to nonfiction? I mean, do you have a different bracket of time you schedule for it, or how do you jump into, say, writing a romance novel? Yeah.

That's interesting. I tend to have ideas that I've thought about for many years that seem to be worth developing, you know, fix in a fiction. So I'll think about characters and setups. And I wrote a lot of screenplays too back in the nineties. And, you know, I had a I had a Hollywood agent for a while and he was pitching him and nothing transpired.

Like, you know, it's like most of us. Right? That, you know, literally 99% of us write novels and screenplays and and, they they don't get any traction in the larger culture. Screenplays teach you a different way of kind of fiction writing in that you, you know, you're basically setting a scene. Right?

So you're you're you're writing it as you as you would film it. So there's gotta be a miza san, you know, a setup for the, the physical location, and then, you know, you describe the characters interacting and the dialogue. So that teaches you a a different kind of structure for for writing a novel. So I think I I follow that kind of screenplay. How shall I call it structure?

But it's mostly the exploration of a theme of of of some larger theme. And so if I'd say for instance, my romance, it's called Verona in spring, And it's the setup that was interesting to me was a young woman approaching 30 who has several suitors. But it's like, what are the trade offs in her life between trying to stay single and, like, losing these these suitors as they go off to find somebody else to get married to. And then and then who should she choose? And, of course, it's it's, the main character's a female, but the same issue is, of course, universal in human life.

And so it's it's that that that sense of there's all these trade offs and, and how do you navigate that? Especially if you're poor, but you know, you're low income, you know? So there's this whole economic element to relationships and your choices in life that we don't talk about so much, right? We talk about romantic love, but there's also you're you're you're forming a partnership with somebody. And then what what's what are the costs and benefits to that?

And and then there's sort of an element of when you're running out of your youth, then you're as in Japan, they call it Christmas cake. Right? That that women who aren't married by 30 become less desirable. So there's this time element. So those were the themes that I wanted to explore.

So that that's I think those themes are probably in your nonfiction writing on finance, you're writing about the same things, making choices, making, trade offs, you know, risks, rewards, liberty, freedom, constraint. Yeah. That's right. That's that's very insightful. And I'm glad you read my my little story about falling in love with a homeless woman because it it's so counter to everything that we're told or what we experience because, of course, many homeless people are not necessarily very pleasant to interact with, but that's that's not a 100%.

Right? There's there's a lot of a lot of diversity in in the homeless population as well. So I I I wanted to explore that. And as you say, there's a certain sort of hope there on on multiple levels. Yeah.

I think that's interesting because when I compare I haven't read all of Kunstler's writing, but his of what I understand, his model making for the world, I mean, it is localized, but it seems darker and colder and less optimistic. So I'm I'm curious if your fiction is just kind of a you're trying to model something for what another alternative reality could be. Yeah. I probably don't have as coherent a vision as as Jim, but that I think that I am I do try to express that I think there is a lot of hope ahead and opportunity, but it's not in the conventional sort of narratives that we're exposed to. Charles, is there anything else you wanna share today?

Or I think I want listeners to take away the message that a lot about finance, but I think there's an optimism about returning to a local and individualized kind of self driven solution or reliance. Is there anything else you wanna share for people? I I would just say, I think that that that there's something about authenticity that's that's really valuable, but it's it's something that we don't we sort of lost the ability to value it and nurture it. And then what we're presented with largely is artifice. And so that hollows us out on so many levels to live in a life that's that that we don't control very much and that that it's largely artifice or superficial or sensationalized.

And so that that hollows us out and and and makes us impoverished in so many ways. And so, really, everything I'm writing about is is is to try to return to what whatever's authentic and and has integrity. I think that's the the the wealth of life. Right? I write about finance because that's also important.

We need shelter, and we need some sense of security. And so I try to combine those and say, well, if you can control your income and and the way that you make money in your livelihood, then then you then you're you you the ideal is to become authentic in the way that you make money as well as the as well as the way you live. And then, Charles, my last question is, what's your advice for people to how do they find their authentic self? I I mean, that's a hard, thing to find. Yeah.

And I'm smiling because it's a it's an ongoing process. I mean, I'm 70, and I'm still performing that search myself. Right? It's a constant questioning. What's authentic for me now?

Because we all change and we we adapt. So being adaptable and flexible about who we are is I think something to keep asking ourselves. And and we we just have to experiment and try things. We we we're not really we don't really know until we we try it. Great.

I think we can end with that point, Charles. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.