In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we are looking at economics yet again, because it is one of the central planks of the changes that we have to make. And our basic proposition is if the death cult of predatory capitalism is based on money, as the commodification of suffering, which it is, how do we create a monetary system that encourages people to help each other? To create communities of place, purpose and passion that are genuinely supportive and to invest where trust and hope lead, rather than simply in the hoarding of ever increasing amounts of value. And this calls into question everything that we think we know about money. What is investment? What’s it for? Why do we do it? Why do we hoard money? Why do we all, at some level turn into Scrooge? Even Trillionaires are still hoarding money like giant dragons in a cave. Not all of them, or at least not all of the billionaires. There’s an ex Wives club that seems to be giving away quite a lot of money, but there is something about our deep insecurities that makes us want to hoard money as a way of feeling better, and it doesn’t work.

Manda: So what can we do instead? This is the topic of a lot of our thinking, and I’m always really impressed when I come upon somebody else who thinks about it very deeply and has ideas. Stef Kuypers is one of those people, and he is an astonishing individual. He taught himself coding at the age of 14 and went on into a career in it, as you would expect. But he’s a complete polymath, or as he would say, multipotentialite by nature. And so he went on to work in fields of creative thinking, improvisation and business interventions, and then realising that money is the heart of the problem he took a deep dive into economics, monetary systems, complexity theory and human behaviour. And today he’s doing a PhD in how monetary systems influence both our individual behaviour and how it affects the way we organise our society. He is the creator of the Sustainable Money Model, and he works for the beautifully named Happonomy in Belgium. He’s also aware, because he’s interested in human behaviour, that we don’t just need a system that will work differently; we need to find ways to help everybody transcend the inner blocks that tell us that the existing system is the only one that can possibly work, and everything else is not realistic.

Manda: So as an avid gamer (and yes, we did talk World of Warcraft when we were not recording) he also plays board games, tabletop games that I have never got into, and that means he has devised games that help people to experience what it’s like to live in worlds that work differently. And then he’s able to look at how they behave differently as a result. And if you or anyone listening has any kind of association with actual digital games companies and you’re interested in this, please let us know. Because regenerative gaming that models regenerative ways of living has to be one of the ways forward. Gaming reaches millions of people. And if millions could experience that there is a different way of living, I think we would reach tipping points faster than almost anything else. So if anybody knows the people who run Blizzard or any of the big gaming companies, pitch them our way. Anyway, that apart, Stef and I explored many routes to money, to economics, to behaviour, to gaming and how we might live differently. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Stef Kuypers of Happonomy.

Manda: Stef Kuypers. I’m still practising saying your surname, but we’ll get there by the end. How are you and where are you on this beautiful spring morning? I suppose we’re nearly in summer, actually, technically.

Stef: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a bit cloudy here, but it definitely feels like spring. Everything’s green outside, I really love that. I’m currently in Leuven. I usually work from home, but today I came in to Leuven, which is where Happonomy is actually seated.

Manda: Oh, excellent. Yeah. That gives us a good lead in. Excellent.

Stef: Yeah. It’s also interesting because we’re working together with a 16 year old high school student, who needed to do an assignment for school for two days with an organisation. And I happen to know his mom. And I think 2 or 3 months ago, after years of not having contact with each other we kind of connected again and went out for a for a drink and started talking about all kinds of stuff. And from that came her question like, oh, my son has to do an assignment for school. Can he do something for the organisation? Because he was really enthusiastic about it. So now he’s sitting upstairs with my colleague Bruno, trying to rework a game that I designed to be adaptable for 12 year olds.

Manda: Oh, wow. But is he learning about regenerative economics as well?

Stef: Well, yeah.

Manda: That is part of the deal. Excellent.

Stef: Yes, yes. He’s a super interesting guy. On the train ride here we had conversations. It went from monetary systems to inequality in society to astrophysics and magnetars and election systems and parallel universes.

Manda: Oh, you see, the future is there. The future generations. We just need to not mess things up in the meantime. Alrighty. So you’re at Happonomyo but I would like, before we get to Happonymy, to just outline for people the sustainable money model that you are presenting. In the pre podcast talk you said you realised after you created it, someone else had gone there. And I guess actually quite a lot of people have gone there as ideas, but you’ve created it into a model. And if I’ve understood correctly, you’ve got ways of helping people to understand it that get past the yes buts. Because the yes buts, the bits of us that get triggered and go, that can’t work, then switch off people’s cognitive capacity. And people don’t internalise this because the yes but parts get in the way. And so I’m really interested in how you get around that. But before we go there, let’s explore what the sustainable money model is, why we need it, and how it works. Over to you.

Stef: Well. It’s actually a couple of principles from other things that I just put together. One of them is Silvio Gesell, an economist from the early 20th century. Actually, Keynes was a real fan of his work. He even wrote down in one of his essays that Gesell would probably have a bigger influence on our economic thinking than Marx would. Well, sadly enough, that didn’t happen. And he kind of got lost in the folds of history, which is a real shame because I’ve been reading his work and the guy was just brilliant. He had a real sense of humour. If you read his work, it’s sometimes tough material to go through. It really changes your perspective on a whole lot of things. The one key thing that I actually took from him, that I put into the monetary system, is his view on money. He saw the problem with money is that it is the only product that you can keep in store indefinitely before you have to bring it to market.

Stef: Now I know that for most people this probably sounds really strange, bringing money as a product to market. I mean, when we think about products, we think about, I don’t know, computers, bread, wheat, stuff like that. And this is something that is in his biggest work, the natural order economy. When you buy bread from the baker with your money, the baker actually buys your money with his bread. And once you start thinking like that and you see money as a product, then the thing that he pointed out is if you bake bread, you have to bring it to market really fast. Because if you wait six months, then probably the chance that people still want to buy your bread is fairly low. But if you’ve got money, you don’t have to bring it to market with urgency. You can decide when you bring your money to market and money is brought to the market when prices go up.

Manda: Well, that depends what you’re doing. When the price of money goes up or the price of goods goes up?

Stef: Well, actually, the price of what you want to buy goes up. So if the price of bread is going up, then I will buy my bread now. Also when when the price of steel goes up, let’s use steel.

Manda: Depends what it is though doesn’t it? Because if the price of land plummets and I have money, I would buy a lot of land. I don’t have that kind of money. But that seems to be what’s happening around us. I mean, land is maybe an exception because as Mark Twain said, they’re not making it anymore, and people are investing in Land as a proof against a collapsing economy, I think. So, yeah.

Stef: Yeah but the thing is, if the price of land is going down, you’re probably going to want to wait until it reaches bottom.

Manda: Until it bottoms. Okay. Yes. That’s true.

Stef: You’re actually going to wait, if you could predict it you would wait just before prices go up again.

Manda: But since you can’t predict it, you wait and you get a little uptick and you rush and that then sends it into a vertical rise.

Stef: Yeah. So money comes to the market when prices start to go up and money retreats from the market when prices are going down. The problem with that is if you’ve got products, you cannot afford to hold them back. You need to bring them to market and no one wants to buy them, So you have to lower your price. The consequence of that is more money is going to retreat from the market. Until there’s a point where prices just cannot go lower anymore and maybe some people think like, oh, well, you know, prices have gone down already a lot, maybe I’ll bring a little bit of money to the market, so prices start going up. And then you’ve got this money that has kind of retreated into this hidey hole, and it’s like a huge pile of money. And all of a sudden all that money comes out of their hiding space and starts to rush to the market, driving prices up and up and up and up. And in both cases, you potentially have crisis.

Manda: Yeah. You have inflationary spirals or deflationary spirals. But we need to be clear, I think, that this is the actions of people who have the privilege of hoarding money. People who just get paid on a weekly or daily or monthly basis and have to survive, don’t have that privilege. They just have to spend their money. They have to bring it to market in the same way that the Baker has to bring the bread to market. Because if you don’t swap the money for the bread, your kids will starve.

Stef: Yeah, but you only bring the money to market that you need to buy stuff with for immediate use. So you buy your food, you need to pay your rent. So it’s actually more the pull of your necessities that will push you to bring money to market. So rent needs to be paid, you need to put food on the table, you need to pay your energy bills and stuff like that. But any surplus, and it’s definitely about the surplus, With the surplus you can decide what you do. And then you’re going to see, oh, I want to buy a new television set, but prices are plummeting, so maybe I’ll wait a little bit longer. Oh, prices are going up; I’ll rush to market now.

Manda: Okay. Yep.

Stef: So that’s one aspect. And Gesell said, well, actually, this has to do with the nature of money, because you can hoard it indefinitely. It doesn’t rot. It doesn’t evaporate. So what he introduced was demerge. He said we should let money rot. I know that demerge is a very technical term. So I’ve been using Parking Fee lately.

Manda: Oh, excellent.

Manda: If you park your money in an account, at the end of the month you have to pay a parking fee for it.

Manda: Yes. And my understanding, we used to call it demurrage, but whatever. It’s not that you have to pay, it’s that it will be taken away. That if you leave $1,000, let’s say, in an account, then by the end of the month there’ll be $900 or pounds or euros or whatever, because this system will just turn it into apples and a few of them rot, basically.

Stef: Yeah. That’s the idea.

Manda: To encourage you to not leave it lying around. I have a question, even right at the beginning of this. Because inflation does that. If you leave your money, if you’ve got 100,000, whatever, an easy round number of something, and inflation is 5% and you’re not getting interest, then you’re losing 5% per annum. I mean, it is eating away at it.

Stef: But you don’t really feel that.

Manda: Okay.

Stef: You look at your account and it’s like, okay, there’s this 3% inflation compared to last year, say, but you look at your account as, oh, I’ve still got €10 000 on my account. The feeling is different than when you look at your account and like, oh, there’s €100 that has just evaporated.

Manda: Okay. Yes, I imagine. And I was just talking to a friend this morning about the fact that years ago when I first got into houses, the mortgage rate was 17.5%. And I think you would notice 17.5% evaporating from your account.

Stef: Yes

Manda: So when inflation is super high, then I guess you begin to notice that. But then you bring more money to market, it’s not going to bring the inflation down. I mean, I think inflation is a very interesting thing because the right to have managed to co-opt it as a ‘if we pay people more, inflation will happen’. And that’s not what causes inflation. But anyway, let’s maybe not go down that rabbit hole.

Stef: Yeah. Our current system needs inflation. The central banks, they’ve got price stability, but their definition of price stability is an inflation of 2%.

Manda: At least. They prefer five. Yes. They need there to be more money in the system by the end of the year than there was at the beginning, because it’s a debt based system. We’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, but there’s always somebody for whom this is the first podcast. Run me through your understanding of how money works at the moment. And then we’ll look at how it could work in your different model.

Stef: Yeah. Well, actually, the way money works today is really simple. Every time a bank issues a loan, new money is created. You pay off that loan, the created money is destroyed. And for that service, you pay an interest with money that was not created by the bank.

Manda: Or was creatively somewhere else. So basically, fundamentally, banks make money out of nothing. Their product is created out of thin air, and then they charge us for the privilege of us using this stuff that they have made out of nothing. And I think a long time ago, ah – who was the white supremacist? Henry Ford said that if people understood the nature of money and how it was made, there would be pitchforks on the streets by the end of the day. And we do understand how money is made, and I don’t understand how it continues to happen. So people listening, please get your heads around this. The banks make money out of nothing. They just invent it out of thin air. They do no work. And for the privilege of this, they pay themselves billions because that’s the profit that they make from selling us this thing that they’ve made out of nothing. This is not a sustainable system.

Stef: And also we need to get the money for that interest from someone else. If you would reduce the size of the economy to one person, say we kick start the monetary system anew.

Manda: I think there are accelerationists who are trying to do exactly that. Maybe ten people. But anyway, go on. Yes.

Stef: Well, say there’s no money and you’re the first person going to the bank, I want a loan for, I don’t know, €1,000. And just to make the math simple, on that thousand euros, you need to pay 10% interest and you want to pay it back in one go. You’ve already created unpayable debt. That’s what the system does. As soon as it is started, you have unpayable debt from the get go.

Manda: Unless. So I did the master’s in regenerative economics at Scumacher, and they taught us, I thought this was amazing. But when Pennsylvania was a state surrounded by basically the people who lived there, who didn’t care about dollars, they had a system where they would create, let’s say, $110, and they would loan out $100 and they would pay $10 to the people making the roads or the feed for the horses or hay or the governor’s wife’s dress, whatever. So the 10% circulated in the economy so that the people did have the extra 10% to pay off the interest. So they no tax, and they had a permanent circulation of money that they could easily define. And within a closed system, there was no need for anything else.

Stef: Where does the 10% come from?

Manda: They make it. They’re making the money. They print the dollars. So they print $100 and they loan them out and they print another ten per 100. And they pay them, because they have costs. We have the governor’s mansion, we make the money and we want to pay for the ink that we printed the dollars with. Or we want to pay you to build a road. So the 10% was fed out into a locked, sealed population as payment.

Stef: So you’ve actually got debtless money that was injected into the economy to pay off the interest.

Manda: Correct. And then apparently the governor of Australia worked this out as well, because Australia is like Pennsylvania. You know, it’s bigger and you have a continent where the Australian dollar is the only money. And he took a boat back to England to explain to the Bank of England this amazing system that he’d discovered that meant debtless money. And he had a heart attack on the boat on the way back and was buried at sea. The corruption of this is just unreal, actually, because that system works really well.

Stef: Yeah. Yeah. It would.

Manda: It’s debt free money and it doesn’t require that everybody consume all of the time in order to prop the system up.

Stef: Yeah. Well, there’s one thing, yes, it works. And it has one slight flaw, because it kind of leans pretty close to modern monetary theory, where governments can create money to invest. But then especially today, thank you Trump, I always ask people, okay, give that system to Trump. How much better would our economy be?

Manda: Yeah, this is James Meadway’s argument, and I want to bring him back onto the podcast at some point. Because, yes, it worked on, let’s say, the island of Britain. If the island of Britain were only an island and not trying to trade in a fiat currency, that has a level that other fiat currencies accept. And that’s where the problem arises, is it’s a really good idea that doesn’t work the way the current monetary system is set up. Because you’re right, Trump would abuse it, but Trump is crashing the dollar anyway. I fully expect that by this time next year, the yuan or the renminbi or something else is going to be the world’s dominant currency because it can’t carry on being the dollar at the current state. However, you have a system that if the economic system collapses, you can bring in. This is back to Milton Friedman saying that when everything goes wrong, the ideas that are lying around are the ones that get picked up, and you are offering an idea that people could pick up. So money is made by banks and it is sold to us at a profit that they make. And this is not a sustainable system. That’s probably as much as we need to say about the existing system.

Stef: Well, there’s one extra aspect to it.

Manda: Okay.

Stef: Because like I said, when you’re one person in the system and you take out a loan, and then you cannot pay your interest. So you need to convince someone else to take out a loan and then you need to get money from them, so that you can pay your interest. But then that person has a problem.

Manda: Yes, it’s a Ponzi scheme.

Stef: Yes, it’s a total Ponzi scheme. We always need to get the money for the interest from someone else who took out a loan. And that kind of means we are kind of passing the hot potato of who ends up with unpayable debt constantly. And that creates a lot of the misery that we see today in the world, and especially once you end up in debt, it becomes really hard to get out of it.

Manda: Yes, yes. Because then the sharks come in and charge you more interest to give you cash because nobody else will, because they don’t think you’re safe. And then you spiral into homelessness and destitution. And that too seems to me an integral part of a system that would like everybody to look down and realise that’s not where they want to be. So how do we make it better, Stef?

Stef: Okay, so we talked about Gesell and how we can make money rot. But  then of course, there’s also the question how do we create new money? Because if you let money rot away and don’t create money, then, you know, after a while everything, hey!

Manda: System does fall over.

Stef: So that part of the monetary system actually leans on the idea of a universal basic income. I use the term guaranteed income because basic kind of gives the idea that we want to give people the minimum to survive. And I think, you know, we can be a little bit more generous. Let’s give people enough money so they can have a good life or at least a decent life.

Manda: I have some big questions about that, but carry on, get to the end of your proposition. Explain how it works and then I’ll ask the questions, because you might answer them on the way through.

Stef: Okay. So instead of banks creating the money, you let the system itself deposit, I’m just going to put a number on it: say €2,000 in every living person’s account at the beginning of the month. So at the end of the month, we’re going to look at your account and we’re going to take off say 5%. And right after we take off 5%, we’re going to deposit the new €2,000.

Manda: We’re only going to take our 5% if you’ve got anything left in the account, because the point of demurrage is that we want people to spend the money. We’re only going to take our 5% above a certain threshold, are we not?

Stef: Well, that’s an optional Design choice, but 5% of zero is zero.

Manda: That’s true. Okay. Fair enough

Stef: So you can never take off more. So what you have then is actually an algorithmic system. So the entire money creation money destruction cycle is automatic and it’s fair because of it.

Manda: So we’re using digital money by now. There’s no actual pound notes and coins?

Stef: Well. I’ve been thinking you could have physical, because Gesell’s idea was to actually have physical money with stamps on it. The computers back in those days didn’t work that well.

Manda: And you’re a computer programmer. At the start of your life you were a programmer. So you understand algorithms. So yes. So how could we work it with physical money?

Stef: Well, also it’s my IT background that made me realise that the current system was not sustainable, because in my view, that was a very badly designed algorithm.

Manda: Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it’s been around – if we read David Graeber and Debt the First 5000 Years, which is a brilliant, brilliant book, it’s been around a very long time. And it started with bits of silver. And, you know, if I stamp my face on this, it’s worth many times more than a bit of silver without my face stamped on it. And if you stamp a face on it, I will kill you and enslave your children. So you can’t. And so for me currency was always the commodification of suffering. It’s a way of imposing hierarchical power, because cultures that don’t have hierarchical power don’t have currency. And so I would like us not to need the currency, and the transition towards that, you have demurrage. So one way or another, money rots basically. So hoarding is a bad idea.

Manda: UBI. Okay, here’s my question on UBI, because I’ve just finished talking to Jeremy Lent quite a lot about this. Let’s take the island of Britain because it’s a closed island. Let’s pretend it’s a closed island at the moment. You give everybody two grand at the beginning of the month. A number. And at this moment, about 50% of the people in the country are renting. And some of those rents are quite high. Let’s say the average is 500 a month. I think the average rent then goes up to 1999 a month. The people who already have a lot of money don’t care because their rents are 5000 a month anyway, it doesn’t matter.  You just developed the fastest way of moving public money into private hands ever invented. And I don’t see how you get around that, because even if it’s not actual physical rent, it’s okay so we’re giving everybody some money; the oil price just doubled. And everything depends on oil. So your food prices, your heating, your water in this country, because we have to pay for water and sewage, your power. All of those just got massively more expensive and you’re still destitute. How do we get around that? How do we get a monetary system where we have rent control, in the Marxist sense of rents as money made out of money? How do we control the rent so that doesn’t happen?

Stef: Well, it’s simple. All that is looked at a UBI in a system where it can hoard money indefinitely.

Manda: So we are going to develop a global system where money cannot be hoarded. Stef you’re going to be on everybody… I’d be really surprised if you lived beyond the end of the week, if you decide to tell the fossil fuel companies that they can’t hoard their money and they can’t keep extracting it in the way that they’re doing. How are we going to make that happen?

Stef: Well women’s voting rights was also something that was really not wanted by some very powerful men.

Manda: But it didn’t change the franchise. I accept this, but women’s voting rights, black people voting, or at least not white people voting, gay marriage; all of these they extended the franchise within the existing system, and the people at the top reckoned in the end that they could stay at the top. This is strategically and completely inverting the system.

Stef: I know.

Manda: I think it’s a kind of order of magnitude different. Several orders of magnitude different. How do we make it happen, Stef? I’m really curious because I think you’re right. I think it needs to. But absent a world armed revolution, which we would lose because we don’t have the drones, how would we make it happen?

Stef: Slowly.

Manda: Yeah but in the meantime, our fossil fuel prices just went through the roof anyway.

Stef: I know.

Manda: You know, creating inflation on the way. Your two grand is going to be worth less than the price of bread in a year if we do this. They’ll just hike the prices because these people are psychopaths.

Stef: Yeah. Okay. The thing is, it’s unpredictable how fast we can get this implemented. We are currently exploring different paths. One of them is through education.

Manda: Your 16 year old is going to change the world! 

Stef: Not only. So I’m an avid board gamer. I’ve been playing board games since I was six. I actually last summer built a new closet because I didn’t have enough space to store all my board games.

Manda: This is grand!

Stef: So I now have a 2.20 by 4 metre closet that is filled up with board games.

Manda: Stuffed with the equivalent of monopoly, but different.

Stef: Yeah.

Manda: Wow. Okay. So are we gaming how to get this out there? That sounds good.

Stef: Yeah. We’re actually collaborating with educational organisations and schools to get the system in schools. Currently it’s middle schools. We’re now redesigning the game so that it can also work for 12 year olds.

Manda: Okay. And this is what your lad is doing in Happonomy.

Stef: Yeah. So that people can experience what a change in monetary system does to you. And the game works really well. The last session we had here in Leuven, at the end of the game we always ask people what did you feel? What did you notice? And there was this one guy and he said  what I noticed is in the first game, which is where we play with the new monetary system, he said the question I heard most from people was, how can I help you? In the second game where we use the current monetary system, he said the question I heard most is, what do you want to buy from me?

Manda: Right. Isn’t that interesting?

Stef: And this is a behaviour change in the time span of an hour.

Manda: Right. Okay. And this is how you get past the yes but bits, because they’re experiencing how it works.

Stef: Yeah. Yeah.

Manda: Wow. Can we make this into a computer game?

Stef: We’re working on that.

Manda: Oh, good. I want to play that. 

Stef: Actually, one of the things I would really like to get to, and if there’s any game developers out there who want to work on this, just give me a call. You know, several years ago there was this Second life hype. Well I actually want to create a sort of Second Life game, where you create two parallel worlds, one with the new monetary system and one with the current one. And now we can actually experience, in a world that is basically the same, but the only thing we change is the monetary system, how it feels. And then we can do research on how people behave in those two worlds. And I think with that, we can have a lot of arguments why we really, really, really should change the system.

Manda: Yes. And you’ll have a lot more people who’ve experienced it. When we find the game developer who wants to do this, I want the one where you’re given an acre of basically sand, and one you can farm it industrially, or one you can farm it regeneratively and you have to feed the people. And I want it to work on actual biological systems. And again, industrial farming would be over as soon as people got through that.

Stef: The thing I’m really interested in is like if you let people in both worlds, which run on the same rules for the biological systems, let’s see what emerges.

Manda: Yeah. Wouldn’t it be interesting?

Stef: Let’s just see if in both worlds you give people the possibility to industrial farming or biological farming. And just see what happens without putting any restrictions or any rules.

Manda: No, no. But it has to run on real world rules. You can’t have spells that make your crops grow. You have to have real world rules. And a deteriorating climate because that’s the nature of the game. Oh, Stef, we have to find someone who wants to do this! I did used to work in a computer games company. I’ll give it a go. We’ll see. We’ve got to make it so that they’ve got to want to sell it and people have to want to buy it, because we still exist within the death cult of predatory capitalism. But okay. Right. Anyway, we are here. And so your sustainable monetary system is demurrage and UBI those are the foundations of it.

Stef: That’s the foundation. What you can also do, and this is an addition that I didn’t find anywhere else, so this might be my small contribution to the model. Let’s introduce a demurrage free buffer. Anything below, say €25 000 is free of demurrage. Because when I talk to people about the demurrage, a lot of people are like, oh, my money is going to melt away. Panic.

Manda: Yes, my retirement pot that I have been saving, because the system needs me to do that will vanish.

Stef: Yeah. That’s also because in the current system, our financial security comes from our saving. In the new system our financial security actually comes from an endless stream of money that will be there for the rest of your life. If you think about those two, I think an endless stream of money might be more comforting than a pot of money that once you touch it, it starts to diminish. And once it’s gone, it’s gone. While the endless stream of money will last your entire life no matter what you do.

Manda: So companies will have to have a different model as well. Because at the moment, most companies are profit based. Even the ones that pretend they’re not, they still have vulture capitalists hovering who need them to make 10%, 15%, 20%. How do you see business models changing?

Stef: Well, this is where the demurrage free buffer actually plays a role. Because you could say like, oh, actually, you know what? For me, the €25,000 demurrage free buffer it’s more than I need. But you have an organisation and you do stuff that I really like, and you probably want some demurrage free buffer too. But we cannot give that to companies because then people would start creating companies that are just demurrage free.

Manda: Exactly. Yes.

Stef: If you do something I like, I can borrow part of my demurrage free buffer to you. So let’s say 20 000 is enough for me; I will lend you 5000 of my demurrage free buffer. I still own it, but you’ve got it on loan now. So you now have a 5000 demurrage free buffer that you can use for your organisation. If more people do that…

Manda: Yeah, you get 100 people, you’ve got quite a lot of…

Stef: Yes. And what you’re doing I still need to like it, because if tomorrow you say like, oh, I’m going to start, I don’t know…

Manda: Making machine guns. Yeah.

Manda: And if I’m getting like, you know what? That’s not really what we agreed upon; I’m going to take it back. Okay. So what you create is a type of new investment model with a permanent relationship. Because currently investment models are based on temporary relationships. I buy your stock, I sell your stock. But if I sell your stock to someone else, that’s not a problem for you. But if I take back my demurrage free buffer, that is a problem for you. So we need to start managing our relationship now on a permanent basis.

Manda: Yes. And we have to have trust based sense making. I have to believe that what you tell me you’re doing and what you’re actually doing are the same. So up to a point I have an idea that one of the most interesting things about blockchain models is not the money, it’s the hack proof data collection. So if you put all your accounts on the blockchain in a way that I can believe, then I can see what you’re doing, and I can see that you’re not hiding the fact that you are in fact, making landmines on the side. When you’re telling me that what you’re doing is, I don’t know, creating regenerative compost and biochar. So we could then begin to get levels of transparency that were volitional. As in I have a company making biochar, and I wish you to be able to see all of the accounts, because I want 5000 of your free. Okay, that’s beginning to sound good. 

Stef: The other thing is a change in business models. Like currently stuff is being produced in a way that actually the producer hopes it breaks down fast enough.

Manda: Planned obsolescence.

Stef: So that you have to buy some more. But that means that your income stream is unpredictable. In the current system that’s not a problem. If you got peaks that are high enough, you can build up reserves and then you just hold on to that and then that gets you through the lows. Now with the demurrage based monetary system, if you got peaks then that means during the peaks, you’re going to have to pay a lot of demurrage and that eats away reserves. So what you want to do is flatten out your income stream.

Stef: And one way to do that is not to sell products that you hope will break down fast enough that then people come and buy a new one. But you instead of selling the product, you rent it out. So it’s a product as a service. You still own the product so if it breaks down, if it needs fixing, if it needs replacement, the cost is for your company. It’s like Thomas Rau did with Philipps. He went to Philipps and he said, I want to buy lights. So Philipps came with we’ve got these lamps and the guy goes like, I’m not interested in your lamps.

Manda: I want to buy actual light. Right.

Stef: I’m not going to pay for your lamps. I want to pay for the actual light. So if you need lamps for that, that’s fine. But you’re going to pay for the lamps. Those lamps use electricity, that’s fine, but you’re going to pay for the electricity. And he actually managed to get a contract with Phillips for lights.

Manda: So they then had an incentive to produce very cheap but very effective power saving forms of light. So the people with whom I’m in contact who run on the Trump side of the track, are terrified of this. Because they think it’s a form of corporate control and that when everything that they interact with is rented, somebody that they don’t trust and know is going to switch it all off. So they think this is part of the kind of conspiracy theory of they’re trying to get us to rent everything and then we won’t own anything, and then everything will be bad. How do we talk past that?

Stef: Well, again, it’s a trust thing. If you can create an organisation that I trust. Then I’ll get my stuff from you and you will now have a sort of market competition on trust. And on customer service and quality of product and all that.

Manda: Okay. We’re building communities of trust. Yes, yes.

Stef: Because no one is stopping you from being an entrepreneur and saying like, you know what, I am going to produce cell phones and I’m going to sign a contract with you that is a life guarantee for you to have this. And I’m doing this because I want you to trust me. And if I break that trust, there are going to be consequences for me.

Manda: Okay. I’m probably not selling your data to Palantir because you wouldn’t like that and you’d go to somebody else. Okay. All right. This is sounding good. This is sounding really good. My thrutopian narrative bit that says how do we get from here to there? Gets stuck on the fact that I can’t see a single government across the world implementing this. And actually, what we need is for the entire world to implement it, because otherwise we have the problem of you are an island and you need to trade elsewhere, and the fossil fuel companies will just come and devour your carcase. So how do we change the governance system, Stef?

Manda: Well, there’s two things. One is governments are being brought into power by the people.

Manda: Mhm. Ish. Some of the people. Less than 30% in most cases around the world. So the current system is designed to amplify a very small vibrational note.

Stef: Yeah. That’s also because our current system actually brings the largest minority to power. And then they claim to be the voice of the people. And now in the United States, you’ve only got two political parties that have any political power, so that’s a bit of a problem. But even here in Europe, our our voting system actually is polarising by design. Because we’ve got 26 political parties in Belgium, I think with the federal elections. 

Manda: I’m kind of envious of that. But anyway.

Manda: Well, but most political parties just don’t get enough votes to even make it across the threshold.

Manda: Oh, okay. So how many are actually the ones that share power amongst themselves?

Manda: Let’s see. We’ve got MVA, the right wing liberals actually are almost out of the picture. You got the Greens, the socialists and the Christians. So I think that’s four and a half that still count. And then you’ve got two political parties in the extremes, the extreme left and the extreme right, that no one wants to govern with. So yeah, that that’s about it.

Manda: Okay. Right. Yeah. So you have a random distribution curve and you’ve got the poles, but then everything else is vibrating around what seems to me to be a centre that doesn’t exist anymore. They’re still arguing about GDP and how many cars we can have on the road and how we can increase the size of our economy. And it’s like, guys, we’re in the bus and the edge of the cliff is about a foot away and you’re arguing about the pattern on the seats. Really? Is anyone in Belgium actually, I mean, the greens presumably a little bit, waking up to the fact that we’re heading for collapse. We’re actually probably in collapse.

Manda: Well, The hard thing to do is to make people look at systems. Because currently everything that’s on the table is kind of trying to turn the knobs within the system. But if you try to change the parameters of your system to a level that is not compatible with the workings of the system, the system will always push back the parameters back where they were.

Manda: Try and get you back into the narrow boundary. Yeah. How do we stop that stef?

Manda: So, well, on a monetary level, you change the monetary system, then you will have a whole new set of incentives.

Manda: We have catch 22. We can’t change the monetary system without a different governance system, because the governance system is very fond of the existing monetary system.

Manda: Yes. But then we can also change the voting system. And if you look at Ireland, Malta, New Zealand, some states in the US with pre elections, there they use ranked voting. And what you see is, well, for one, it gives the voter more of a choice, because you can say okay, I like this candidate or party, and this one is actually good too so I’ll put it at second place. This one’s nice I’ll put it at third place. And the rest I either don’t give a ranking or I put it all the way at the bottom.

Manda: If I don’t give a ranking, does that mean it ranks zero? So if I had the choice of over here and I just went reform, I don’t even want to give them a number. Would they get zero?

Stef: Yeah. The way the Irish voting system works with their ranked voting is so they first look at the first choice of everyone. Then they look at the percentages of the votes. There’s a certain threshold that candidates need to come to, to get across. If no one gets across the threshold, or if not enough candidates cross the threshold, they eliminate the one with the lowest percentage. And for all those voters, they look at their second choice. They add that. They again look at it. So if you didn’t rank a political party that you actually don’t like, then for your ballot, they will never have a vote added to their score. And once enough candidates are above the threshold, then the election ends. Now you’ve got a slightly better system in my opinion anyways, which is rated voting.

Manda: Is that like quadratic voting?

Stef: No. We actually do rated voting all the time on the internet these days when we score hotels  at booking.com or at Yelp or restaurants, we give them a star rating 0 to 5. You could do that with political parties too, or political candidates.

Manda: And why is that different to ranked?

Manda: It’s because you don’t have to think, do I like this one better than that one? You can just look at each one individually, it’s just a less of a mental load.

Manda: So I could give five stars to two separate parties and none to the rest if I wanted to. Okay. Right.

Stef: You could also say, and this is again, psychological, you could also instead of going from 0 to 5, you go from minus five to plus five, right?

Manda: Yes. It does make a big difference.

Stef: Yeah. And then you start off with every single political party at zero. And then you can say like, okay, this one I’m neutral. This one  I actually really don’t like.

Manda: This is how Trump ends up with approval ratings of -89% or whatever it is at the moment. So can I ask you a question on that? Because there’s parties and there’s candidates. And here we have the Scottish elections and I think the Welsh elections. And I think they’re on a form of ranked voting. Oh, no, they’re on a top up list as well. So you can vote for the candidate that you want, but then you can also vote for the party. And it leads to the party apparatchiks. So the parties are, as far as I can tell, wholly corrupt, with the possible exception of the Greens as they stand at the moment. And they will either parachute somebody into a constituency that has nothing to do with the constituency, but they know it’s a safe constituency and they’ll get the person who says what they want them to say. Or they’ll have party lists that are ranked according to we like this person or we don’t like this person, and you don’t really actually end up with a lot of choice.

Stef: Well, it’s a multi-step process. Because you also have to consider complexity of voting versus democratic outcome. You could apply the same ranked voting to all the candidates.

Manda: Okay. In a kind of primary. Yeah. Okay.

Stef: But then people would spend a lot of time in the voting booths, especially if you’ve got 26 political parties with 30 people on every list. But you could also say you do it in stages, with the rated voting. I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot in the recent years. One problem that I was struggling with was, what about the size of your coalition? Because, you know, who decides on the size of the coalition? I came up with a solution for that. You could do a rated voting alongside the political rated voting on the size of the coalition. So everyone just gives stars to their perfect size of coalition they would like. There is one number that comes out of that that has the highest rating.

Manda: We’ve got to give people a band. So it’s not zero to infinity. You’ve got a band between…

Manda: No, it’s one to the number of political parties.

Manda: A coalition of one? It just means whoever got the most votes. Is that not just getting back to the first past the post quite quickly?

Manda: Well, but then we want to kind of design the most democratic election system, which means you need to give people that choice.

Manda: Okay. Yes. But this gets back to people choosing freely and the extent to which they are being fed rubbish that is toxic and designed to intoxicate on the internet. How do we get past that?

Stef: Yes. But the thing is, you have to remember that political candidates behave differently within the system. Because today you can say like, you know, I am the best, everyone is shit and you throw mud and shit at everyone.

Manda: Watching that happen. I don’t know if it happens in Belgium, but it definitely happens here.

Stef: It happens. But imagine what happens in a rated voting system when you do that. Say you got a hardcore backing of 30%, right? That means you’re throwing shit at 70% of the people, right? What will those 70% do? They’re not going to give you maximum points.

Manda: They will decide they don’t love you. Okay. Right. Yes.

Stef: You have to be nicer to the other candidates.

Manda: Provided you don’t have a sufficiently sophisticated, algorithmic, highly targeted defamation campaign that destroys the other candidates. Yeah.

Stef: So you let people vote on the size of the question that is formed. So one number comes out of it. That means that once you have the ranking of your rated voting for the political parties, you know which political parties will be in your government. Coalition size of three, the three highest Ranking political parties form your government.

Manda: Even if, let’s say hypothetically, and I realise this is unlikely, you get the extreme right, the extreme left and one from the centre. And those three have to form the coalition? And there’s nothing to kind of even them out?

Manda: Apparently this is what is most strongly supported by your population. So which is the most democratic choice you have.

Manda: Wow. Okay. I’d like to throw something into the mix that I think is also worth it. They do this in Australia, which is that on any ballot paper you have the option of none of the above. And if none of the above wins in any particular constituency, they have to hold the election again. And nobody who is on the ballot is allowed to stand. And I think that also gets past the party apparatchiks. You look at that list and you go, all of these people are complete nonsense. I don’t want any of them: none of the above. And if enough of you do that, and it risks that all the people that think like you do that, and the super extremes at one end or the other don’t, and you are risking somebody you really didn’t want getting in. But it strikes me that there will be times when an educated enough electorate goes, you know what? We’re not playing this game anymore.

Stef: Yeah, definitely. And there’s another thing I want to add to it, because there’s also a lot of talk about like what if you just randomly select people to be in your government?

Manda: Well, that’s a different form of governance, isn’t it? That’s citizens assemblies who are then there to bring wisdom to those with power.

Stef: Yeah, you could mix it. Because you could have a party on the list that is randomly elected people.

Manda: Oh, that’s an interesting idea.

Stef: Yeah. So if that that group makes it to the top X, then you’ve got a parliament that has so many people from that party, and so many people that are randomly elected. And as you say, if the none of the above makes it into the government then you need to redo your elections. That’s a really nice addition. Thank you.

Manda: Well, I think it works at a constituency level. Because at a constituency level, in this constituency if none of the above wins, then they have to get a by-election. Within a very short space of time each party then has to find someone else to stand, where we’re not just going to keep going ‘none of the above’. They have to actually let local people that we all know, and we have some sense of who they are as human beings, stand. Instead of parachuting in the party apparatchiks. Okay, so we’ve got a voting system. I really do like quadratic voting, but let’s not go there. I think it’s a little bit… It’s not complex. I’ve got a friend who designed an app and was using it in Finsbury Park to help people decide what was going on the plinths. And they were using it in Iowa, I think, or Idaho, somewhere in the state Senate and Congress, they were using quadratic voting. So it’s not complex, but it’s another way of assigning people a basket of votes, and it costs more to weight a vote. So if say, you give them 25 votes, then you could give five each to five candidates. But maybe you want to give a lot to one candidate. It costs a lot more and so then you don’t have the spread. So you either have a spread or you just dump all your chips on one person. And it tends again to create more nuance within a system. Okay, so we’ve got that. And then we get to a parliament. An interesting idea that the coalition isn’t a coalition of 26 different parties, it’s a coalition of however many parties we think. What would you have as the age bracket within which people can vote? So the lowest and the oldest?

Stef: Huh? I don’t really have an answer to that. But what I do notice, especially with talking to the 16 year old on the train, there’s a lot of wisdom there.

Manda: Yes, a lot. Possibly more than your average 89 year old president of the world, who clearly is defective.

Stef: Yeah. And also what governments decide impacts children too.

Manda: For much longer. Yes. So we’re saying yes to 16 year olds. Okay. I would have a cut off at 85.

Stef: The thing is, actually I can’t really give a definite answer to that. Maybe we should even include younger voters. Maybe we should just do a trial election.

Manda: See what the outcome is.

Stef: Where we include everyone from the age of 12 and up, even maybe let’s do a trial election.

Manda: No lower as well as no upper. Yeah. Okay.

Stef: You could implement that in the simulation game that we talked about earlier. You create different worlds with different System settings. So you got one world where you’ve got the model with no bounds on age election system, that is based on the rated or quadratic voting system. And you can make different worlds and kind of see what comes out of it.

Manda: You’d have to assume that ten year olds are playing or lower ages were playing, but then you’d have to assume that lower ages wanted to vote. 

Stef: I think that the most people on the internet playing games are that age.

Manda: Yeah. That’s true, I play games.

Stef: They’ve got the time to do that. I play games too.

Manda: We can talk gaming after. Okay, so here’s another suggestion, and this is one that I put in any human power. It’s in the last novel. 10 to 15 and 80 to 85; if you want to vote, you have to agree to three hours of moderated (facilitated, to make sure the 85 year old is not grooming the ten year old) conversation; three separate hours. And at the end of it, you don’t have to agree with each other, but you have to agree that you have been heard. And if both of you agree that the other person listened, then you both get to vote. If either of you thinks the other person doesn’t listen, neither of you gets to vote.

Stef: Well, I think that’s more something that comes from a fear reaction.

Manda: I don’t know. It gets them talking to each other and they don’t know each other. So these are randomly selected. It’s very unlikely you’re talking to your grandpa.

Stef: My assumption is because with the current voting system, there are a lot of people that have like, why even bother? My vote doesn’t matter anyways.

Manda: Well, and often it doesn’t. Certainly in our system. If you’re in a safe seat. I’ve never had a vote that counted.

Stef: Yeah. But I think with a rated or the quadratic voting system you talked about, and this is an assumption, but I always like, you know, if you’ve got an assumption, you need to test the assumption. Without Putting in guardrails before we even test it out, whether we could work without the guardrails. 

Manda: I just want a sense that the older people have listened to the younger people. My dad died two weeks after the Brexit vote. And, you know, there was no investment in the outcome or no having to live with the outcome. Whereas the people who were two weeks too young to vote are going to have to live with it for the rest of their lives. I would have a cut off at 85 because I think if you can’t vote under 15, why should you vote over 85? The under 15 have got to live with the impact. And we know from basic neuropsychology that people’s political stance tends to be locked in between 18 and 24. And if you’re 85, that was 60 years ago. The world was a completely different place. And I get a lot of pushback from 85 year olds. Not the 85 year olds who think that voting is a waste of time. The people who think that their vote is useful, once every five years. Guys, there’s other ways of influencing the system. And how much does that influence the system? We’ve had essentially the same government for most of my life, they’ve just had a different coloured tie. But they oscillate between terribly narrow boundaries.

Stef: I think that that more comes from the way the system works than from the way the people think.

Manda: Well, the people have had the options to vote for something other than the main two political parties. As we see now, it’s really breaking apart because reform and the Greens at either end are sucking up all the oxygen. But people didn’t have to vote that way.

Stef: But you also have to look at it from the side of the politicians. They are locked into that system. So actually, if you look at the incentives of the system, the incentive of the system is not to do good governance. The incentive of the system is to get elected.

Manda: Sure, and then to stay there.

Stef: While with a rated voting system, there is more of an incentive to do good governance because that will get you more points.

Manda: Okay. How long do you think we’ve got to implement this stuff?

Stef: Um, well, someone needs to build up the courage to go to an election and say, we want to have a political reform. I’m gathering a couple of people that we’re actually going to try to do this here in Belgium.

Manda: Yay! Maybe it’ll spread across the world.

Stef: Yeah. And the thing we actually want to achieve, and this is probably far fetched, but I work from the principle dream big. It’s always easier to make it smaller afterwards.

Manda: Yeah. Sounds good.

Stef: Because if you dream small, it’s really harder to make it bigger. So our goal is, imagine we get elected; we want to implement our sustainable money system on a national level as a complementary currency and change the voting system to the system actually I was just talking about. And from then, then we’ll see what happens.

Manda: So we’re technically over the hour, but I want to know, tell us a little bit about how your complementary currency would work locally and internationally.

Stef: Okay. So flipping the switch is hard. I would say on a technical level, it’s not hard, but on a psychological level, it’s impossible. So you need to build up the new system alongside the current system. What you could do, if you do it at a national level that would would be, I think the scale that will work best. You could give every citizen in your country the option to opt in into the system partially. Meaning you can say I opt in for a percentage. Say I opt in for 10%. That means that I am willing to receive 10% of what I get paid in this new currency, but it also means I only get 10% of my guaranteed income, I only get 10% of my demurrage free buffer.

Manda: Right. And can I pay 10% of my taxes in that income? Because it seemed to me that the capacity to pay local taxes is…

Stef: Well, I’ll get to that.

Manda: Cool. All right. Go.

Stef: There’s also a reciprocity principle built in. Say you’re really enthusiastic, you jump in for 100%. When I do a transaction with you, the lowest commitment level is taken. So I only jumped in for 10%. You jumped in for 100%. I can only pay you 10% of what I buy from you in this new currency.

Manda: Okay.

Stef: Because you can also only pay me for 10% in this new currency.

Manda: How do I, as a person who’s jumped in with 100%, have the other 90% to buy something from you? How do I get that, though? How do I get the existing currency, the fiat currency, If I’ve gone 100% for the local currency and I can only engage with you at 10%.

Stef: No, because everyone who has stepped in lower than you can also only pay you at their level.

Manda: Okay. But I can pay them at my level.

Stef: No, in every transaction…

Manda: You defer to the lowest. But how do I get the euro along with the Belgian franc? 

Stef: Because I can only pay you for 10% in my currency.

Manda: Yes, but if I want to buy something from you.

Stef: Yeah, but the other 90% I have to pay in euros.

Manda: But suppose I am more buying stuff than selling stuff? How am I getting the wherewithal to buy the stuff in a currency that I am no longer receiving.

Stef: But you’re still receiving it. It’s the same as it is today. If you’re buying more than you’re selling, how are you going to support yourself?

Manda: Well, I’ve got UBI coming in, but UBI is coming in in the complementary currency.

Stef: Yeah. So part of your expenses is now covered by UBI. So actually your total financial pressure has already been lowered by your UBI. Because say you buy everything from me, right?

Manda: Yeah. There’s only two of us in this country and I’m getting 100% in new currency. Let’s call it whatever you want to call it, Belgian currency. And you’ve got 90% in euros and 10% in Belgian currency. And I want to buy from you. And I can only give you 10% in Belgian currency. Where do I get the 90% of euros to buy something costing 100?

Stef: Well, from the same sources that you got it before. So it’s a transition thing. You still need to get euros from where you can get euros, but there’s an incentive to actually push up the commitment level. And this is where the taxes come in. But this is something that would really need to be researched. I cannot tell you the numbers.

Manda: Okay, we need to put this in the model. When we make the game, it needs to be in the model.

Stef: But what you could do is like, so your government has expenses. If among those expenses, there are people that are willing to accept this new currency, that means a part of their expenses can, up to the level, they can collect taxes in this new currency. Which means that now you actually get an engine going, that people can start paying taxes in this new currency. Which is an incentive to commit to this new currency, because all of a sudden you got taxes that you can pay from a UBI.

Manda: Yes. Yes, totally.

Stef: And this is actually the entire incentive structure in that model that will nudge people to commit more and more. It is also a boost for your local economy, because everything that is produced and consumed locally can potentially be paid in this new currency. And so you got a lot less financial stress for the people in your country. You got a boost for your local economy and local production. And what we can then do is export that model to other countries.

Manda: Okay. Once they’ve seen it work. Yeah.

Stef: Because what you can do is you can actually start interviewing people on how do you feel living in this country? And if the news starts getting spread around like, oh, actually people are happy here.

Manda: Yes. You’re creating the thrutopian future that people will yearn for.

Stef: This is what happened in Wörgl in the 1930s. I found an article from French news reporter who actually visited Wörgl and interviewed the people there.

Manda: Right. You’re going to have to tell people about the currency there, because I don’t know that we’ve covered it on the podcast.

Stef: Yeah. So the mayor of Wörgl, Unterguggenberger, I think it was, introduced currency based on a sales idea.

Manda: Yeah. Demiraj based local currency.

Stef: Yeah. He issued local money. Well he didn’t call it money, they were work certificates. So he issued work certificates for people that were doing work for the local local government, the city council. And every week they had to buy a stamp to put on that currency because otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it. So this was money that was costing money to hold on to, and they could pay their taxes with. So what happened was the local economy boomed. He managed to actually finish all of his projects on his long list of projects that that he had when he was a mayor. And also and this I got from the article, people were happy there. Because the first thing that people said, oh, money that cost me money. Oh!

Manda: Spend it. Yeah. How can I help you?

Stef: The thing there was people were happy to use this money. There was actually more social connection, there was more joy in that community. And it spread. It really spread. At one point, there was a meeting with 200 other council members from surrounding towns who were really interested in this money model. And then the German and Austrian central bank said like, oh no, we’ve got a monopoly money. We’re gonna make this illegal. And from one day to the other, the town was thrown back into an economic crisis.

Manda: Yeah. Because the thing to say is he started this because there was an economic crisis.

Stef: Yes, yes. And there are voices going around, but whether that’s true or not, is that if that would have spread, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have risen to power. Because he came to power on the back of an economic crisis.

Manda: Yes. All kinds of things. If I had enough time, I would write the novel of the kind of alternative history. Oh. So interesting. A long time ago, I went to a dinner in Oxford, and I sat next to a woman and her husband who spent half of their time, they were economics professors teaching at Oxford and the other half advising the Scottish Government. And it was very similar to that. There wasn’t a buy in percentage, but it was you give everybody a card and you give every business a card machine, and onto that card every month goes 5000 Scottish pounds. And you can only spend them in Scotland. They will take them as tax. And that’s really crucial, I think, to people wanting to do this. Because that stops there being exchanges at the border where the English pound and the Scottish pound vary in value so that people can extract value from the exchange. If they take it as tax, it holds its value and you can’t play those games. So I think that’s really crucial. And they reckoned again there’s that multiplier effect of people are spending money locally, but because they’re spending money with a currency that only has value within certain borders, the things that you get from outside those borders that are required to uphold the things within the borders increase. I think it’s brilliant, and I would like to see it happen. And the thing that really worries me about it is that it is still predicated on extraction of value in a capitalist system.

Stef: Well, the thing there is you could also, with the new monitoring system, you actually can also do a tax reform. Because currently what we do is we tax income, which is a flow. So we’re actually taxing based on GDP right? Gdp goes down, income for governments goes down, we’ve got a problem. Problem is we cannot infinitely grow our economy on a finite planet. So with this sustainable money system, the total amount of money in your economy is calculable. You can actually calculate based on the number of people in your country, based on the parameters of the system, how much money will be in your economy. What you can do is you can you can implement a Demurrage based tax. So on top of the demurrage that is used for system stability, so you need to destroy money because otherwise you get massive inflation. You add a demurrage based tax, so actually you don’t tax the flow anymore, you tax the stock. You tax on the amount of money in your country. And that is predictable. And on top of that, it doesn’t change when your economy plummets.

Manda: Okay. Because you’ve got a certain fiscal stability. The actual amount of money stays the same. That’s assuming that you’ve got no leaky borders. Okay. How do we step then? How do we take that through to creating an economy that is not based on extraction, consumption, destruction, pollution?

Stef: Because it opens up the possibility to do that. I don’t think we as a human species want to be destructive and extractive.

Manda: Mhm. We need to survive within a debt based system.

Stef: Yes. Context creates behaviour. And we have created contexts that constantly push us towards destruction. Now if we create a context where destruction is not necessary anymore, I really believe that we as a human species will become more creative instead of destructive.

Manda: Yeah, we just need to be given the space. Have you read Christian Felber’s Economy for the Common Good?

Stef: I haven’t read it.

Manda: You’re aware of it? Because he’s suggesting that you tax businesses, particularly on a set of social, cultural and ecological parameters. So the ones that are doing the most damage get the most tax, and the ones that are doing the least damage might have no tax at all. And then you have a tax based incentive. But if you can’t do that worldwide, the companies just leave and go to a place that’s not doing that. You know, the fossil fuel companies. We’ve got to stop ISDS, which for people listening is Investor State Dispute Settlements, which are basically a license for big companies to sue nations for more than they own if they stop them from extracting.

Stef: But the thing I want to add to is but you also have to give those people, because in the end, companies are people. There’s no company that runs… Well, not yet anyways. 

Manda: This time next year? But anyway, at the moment, companies are people. They might be people with quite warped incentives by human standards, but they’re still people. Carry on.

Stef: But still, you need to give them a way out. If you push someone in a corner, they will fight back.

Manda: They will fight and they can fight hard. So what’s the way out, Stef?

Stef: Well, let’s look at fossil companies. Currently they’re kind of locked into a profit model. They need to make more and more profit in order to survive. With a different monetary system, they can actually go to a business model that just earns them enough money to survive from. The profit doesn’t have to go up.

Manda: We need the off ramp as well. Because they need to stop making enough money to survive.

Stef: And we have to look at what is the expertise they have. They’re really good in drilling, right? Geothermic energy needs drilling expertise.

Manda: Okay. I have serious worries about that. But anyway. Go on.

Stef: Yes. But that’s a different conversation. What we need to do is we need to with All these companies that we now say like, oh, you’re the bad guys. And we need to stop calling them the bad guys. We really need to do it, because we need to look at the people behind it. We’re all people. And in the end, I think that apart from the very small percentage of real psychopaths out there, people really actually want to do good. But very often the context pushes them towards doing bad. And we lose ourselves. And I don’t want to blame the individuals. I really want to point the finger to the system that creates the behaviour that comes out of it.

Manda: That seems fair.

Stef: So if what if we can look at all these companies that we now point out like, oh, you’re the problem, and we give a way out that they become part of the solution. Like, look, I know you’re struggling. I know that within the systems that we have in place now, it’s really hard to do something else than what you’re doing now. We’re going to give you a way out, because we believe that you actually want to do good. And that right now, it’s really hard. Actually, there’s a real life example. I saw a talk from David Graeber a while ago.

Manda: It’d be a while ago because he died recently.

Stef: Yes, I know, I know, but apparently a couple of oil companies had written a letter to government in which they were begging to be regulated.

Manda: Yeah. That’s when the previous head of shell was in place.

Stef: Yeah. They literally said, if you do not regulate us, we cannot do the right thing. So let’s help them out so they can actually do the right thing.

Manda: Okay, get rid of the perverse incentive structures that we have. Because at the moment, if shell doesn’t make an increase of profit of $3,000 a second, which they are just doing, then Exon will do it instead. And actually, most of the oil extracted in the world is not extracted by private companies, extracted by national by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and UAE. And that’s why we have to have a global change in the system.

Stef: Yeah. So let’s stop pushing people in corners and blaming them for everything that’s wrong in the world. But say like, hey, you know what? It’s not your fault. It’s the system’s fault. Let’s do something about it.

Manda: You’re much nicer than I am. But that’s good. That’s good that there are people like you around and you are able to do that, and you’ll probably be heard in ways that I won’t. So we are way over the hour. Is there anything else that we need to bring into the picture? This feels like we’ve roamed really far and really wide, and it feels really generative.

Stef: Well, there’s one last thing that I’d say. All my systems thinking work all starts from the fact that human nature has been the same for the last hundred thousand years. We’re still running human operating system 1.0.

Manda: Yeah. E.o. Wilson, Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and the technology of Gods. And this is not a winning solution. Yes, we could upgrade our operating system: conscious Evolution.

Stef: Well, no, the thing is we cannot upgrade our operating system; we need to work with it. So what we need to do is design our systems around human nature. Not trying to change people, not trying to use sticks and carrots to mock people into a different type of behaviour. But how can we create a context where given the way people are and that they will always be for the foreseeable future, we can get the best possible behaviour. Because we are a very kind, caring and social species. I mean, I think I’ve been walking around on this planet for almost 58 years now.

Manda: You’re so young.

Stef: But still, I’ve met thousands and thousands of people that I just crossed in cities all over the world. I’ve only been punched in the face once.

Manda: Okay. I’m five years older than you, and I have to say, I’ve never been punched in the face, so. Yay! And mind you, I haven’t spent a lot of time in many cities. I’m pretty city phobic, so maybe that’s the thing. Okay. Yes, I hear what you’re saying. Personally, I think we can upgrade our consciousness and I think we need to, but I’m really interested in how we create systems that work with the Palaeolithic emotions. Because that’s exactly what all of the current media and social media systems are designed to get the worst out of people. The race to the bottom of the brainstem, the limbic hijack, all of those things. It would be very interesting to explore how we do the inverse of that. That might be podcast number two, Stef, if you’re up for it because I think that would be fascinating.

Stef: Yeah, sure.

Manda: All right. In the meantime, we’re way over time, but that was a very interesting conversation. And thank you for engaging with me, exploring things that I haven’t often had the chance to really go deep with people who actually get it. So thank you, that was really encouraging.

Stef: Thank you for the invitation. I really enjoyed it.

Manda: Excellent. All right. So thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I look forward to podcast number two.

Stef: Okay!

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Stef for all that he is and does. And I want to play those board games, Stef, if you listened this far. I am also really looking forward to a second edition where we explore the operating system of humanity. I think there is huge potential there if we can agree to disagree, because I think it needs upgrading. And if you think we can work with it as it is and it really works, then let’s go with that. It’s going to be a lot easier than trying to upgrade 8 billion people. But that apart, please follow some of the links in the show notes. Stef’s done some really cool Ted talks and other videos on other forms of podcasts, where he explores in much more detail the ways that the sustainable money model can work, with diagrams. So if you’re a diagram kind of person, go find them. And even if you’re not, the concept of money that actually loses value so you have to spend it; the concept of not having to hoard money because there is a UBI; if we can make that work, and I think we only make it work on a global level and I think that’s actually very hard.

Manda: But anyway, we can still entertain it as a concept. Start playing with ideas of how your life would change if this was the case. Because only by feeling it, only by talking to other people about it, so that we can begin to seed the ideas that these things are possible, this is how we change the world. And we need a new monetary system. We cannot change with a debt based monetary system. And if each of us does nothing else, having conversations with our neighbours, our friends, our family, our colleagues about the fact that the world could run differently and would be much better, is a key step on the way to where we need to go. So if you’re feeling somewhat cowed by the geopolitics of the current world, then this is something that we can all do. We don’t have to set up straw men. We don’t have to set this up as a binary. We don’t have to set it up as an assault. It can be a conversation that centres on the fact that money is an idea. Money is an agreement that we make collectively, and we could choose to make completely different agreements collectively if enough of us saw that it was a good idea. So let’s spread the good ideas, eh?

Manda: That’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for amazing Whizzy YouTube editing. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the tech and all of the conversations that keep us moving forwards. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to engage with the way we could treat money differently so that we don’t have to be stressed about it all the time, then please do send them this link.

Manda: And before we go, the gathering is on Sunday. That’s Sunday, the 17th of May 2026, if you’re listening way in the distance. It’s called Falling in Love with Life. And it’s from 4:00 till 8:00pm UK time on Zoom. So if you fancy falling in love with life, living every moment of every day where your heart space sings with the sheer beauty of being alive, then follow the link in the show notes and we will see you on Sunday. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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