In Conversation

Remzi: Creditism is a monetary system where we can reclaim our credit instantly. Just like MMT is trying to also explain, here’s how it works. And once you know, you can, of course, design a different credit system to reclaim the currency in your country, but you still have strategies to reclaim the commons. But there are many legal ways that people are doing that already. They’re creating various funds, venture, you know, for purpose funds. People are already willing to kind of gift their existing land or maybe housing that they have and into these various trusts where they can be then distributed for purpose rather than for profit. And so you can change the nature of organisations and commitment pooling to slowly take away the resources from the poor profit world. So that’s the beginning of escape of capitalism, if you will, because Creditism represents a game where we’re chasing our purposes. What are our human purposes for using these resources in this labour?

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 all 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. The central tenet of this podcast is that we need total systemic change. We need to emerge into a new way of being human. The evolution of our consciousness, consciously chosen. Central to this is that we need a new way of exchanging, storing, and accounting for value, which is what our monetary system does. If it were working in any kind of normal, functional, sane and remotely sustainable way, our economy would be the moving around of the ways of accounting for exchanging and storing value. And instead, our economy is a way of shovelling value very, very, very fast from the billions of people at the bottom of a very steep sided pyramid, right up to the top. A few years ago, Daniel Schmachtenberger said that the thing that will destroy humanity is our failure to understand exponential growth. He was referring to the growth of digital capacity and AI technologies. But I would say it’s the same with economics. We are not noticing the exponential growth of value to the top, the way it’s being sucked out of the whole of the economy and shovelled up to the billionaires and the trillionaires simply by the nature of the commodification of capital.

Manda: This is what happens when you have compound interest. So how do we make a peaceful transition to a wholly new system when the old one is sustained by those who profit most from what we frequently refer to as the self-terminating zombie of predatory capitalism? Our guest this week, as he will tell us, used to be deeply embedded in the capitalist system. Then he had something of an epiphany, and he spent the past decade devising an answer to the most central of our questions: how do we create a system that replaces capitalism as a result? Remzi Bajrami is co-founder of the Common Planet Foundation and creator of Creditism, which is his answer to our dilemma. In his words, Creditism is a new economic system designed around life instead of debt. In this system, credit flows to people because existence itself has value. It circulates through life and then it clears. It supports living without becoming a permanent claim to the future. It is also a non-debt-based economic system designed to replace extraction with flow. Scarcity with access and coercion with coordination. It’s a gateway to a global economy that is cleaner, fairer and more life aligned, one that supports human potential, community self-governance and planetary regeneration. In short, Creditism is the economic architecture for a species that wants to survive.

Manda: There are still a whole bunch of unanswered questions in this, but there are always going to be whatever system we choose until we get moving with something, road test it and reinvent it on the fly. If we wait till we have all the answers, we will never get going. And as I’m sure you’re aware by now, if you have listened to any previous episodes of this podcast, time is quite tight. So what Remzi and his colleagues have done is to set up a system that you can join now, or at least you can join it in early August of 2026 and become part of a network that will test this out in parallel to the existing capitalist system. In the meantime, and to get you going, Remzi has written a series of Substacks which are in the show notes, and which lay out in straightforward terms how the current system is predicated on Power-Over, how money works in our current system, because we cannot hear that one too often—and how Creditism could work instead. And so before you rush off to click the links in the show notes, here we are talking through all of this with the man himself. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Remzi Bajrami of the Common Planet Foundation.

Manda: Remzi Bajrami, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this kind of hot here July day?

Remzi: I am blessed and cursed with information in Oregon, United States.

Manda: Right. Are you seeing Canadian wildfire smoke?

Remzi: Not this far south. I think those are on the East Coast right now.

Manda: All right, let’s not go there. Let’s look at the ways where we could make it all better even now. So you thought up Creditism, and I’ve been reading it for a while now, and it feels to me like one of those things we have got to change our economic system in the total systemic change we need. Economics has to be at the core of the new reality that emerges from where we are. And there aren’t that many people who have viable routes forward to a system that would actually work. And Creditism feels like one of those. So before we head into exactly what Creditism is, tell us a little bit of your origin story. How did Remzi come to be the person who realised how money works, realised the current system isn’t working? We’ll look at that in a minute and figured out a way that would work. What drew you to this?

Remzi: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily use the word realised so much as I discovered or learned. You know, this was our information that’s already been out there. It’s just a matter of actually looking for and wanting to learn it. So my background is that, as I mentioned to you personally, I was born in Yugoslavia. So we were obviously poor. We came to this country when I was five years old. My dad was in construction and he did well for himself. He  was self-employed and our town was booming. And so he did well. And with the money that he made, I saw how it transformed the lives of our family, our relatives, his villages, the people back home. And we would visit all the time. Every summer we’d go there and I would see the difference in my life and how I was privileged. And I hadn’t done anything, of course, differently than my cousins and these folks over here. But our lives were completely different. And so that was obvious. And it wasn’t due to what I did right, or what necessarily my dad had done. He was merely doing the work that he was doing over there. Except that over here, it gets paid more. And so I saw money change the lives of these people.

Remzi: And so when I was 18, I had this personal discovery where a journey where I asked myself, why am I here? What is the purpose of life? And I landed on to help as many people as possible. And so I thought the way to do that would be to make as much money as possible. Now, we have to be clear here. I wasn’t trying to save the world, whatever that means. I was merely just trying to help as many people as possible because that is within our capacity. We can be helpful to people. But I didn’t have any grand dreams of wanting to change the world or anything like that. I didn’t think that was even possible because, you know, here we are. I grew up in America, and I was taught that capitalism, democracy in America already solved the problem of social coordination and life and economics. And so there’s nothing for us to do except for, you know, try to discover some new things, maybe in medicine or engineering or whatever it may be, but certainly not in the realm of this idea that you or any person could, or should waste their time on social organisation that’s already been solved. We’ve already have the end of history. The perfect system.

Manda: Exactly. Fukuyama. Yes.

Remzi: Yeah. But so that’s what it was for me. And so thus began my devotion to learning about finance and economics, really mostly more about finance than economics, I would say, because money is that branch of economics. But it’s not economics per se. So I went to college to study economics, but I quickly discovered that this wasn’t it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t getting what I wanted, so I left and I decided to pursue communications because I thought me being able to communicate and connect with people, that’s going to be the way that I’m going to be the most successful in making money, not necessarily studying economics. I came to University of Oregon and to pursue journalism because I was influenced by this journalist and I saw him. He had the best life. He had been able to interview and talks with basically the most important powerful people in the world. And so I was like, I want to do that. But what I didn’t know and I didn’t learn until I was halfway through university, was that journalists don’t get paid anything.

Manda: I was thinking that.

Remzi: As a matter of fact, they probably make the least of all professions. And so I was in the wrong field. So I quickly adjusted and emphasised public relations instead because that branch at least makes more money. Anyway, so I got that degree, I left, I went back east into Connecticut, where I was when I grew up, and I got a job in data management and all that, wasn’t happy with it, and immediately left to compete with them, basically to allow people to manage their own information, their own data, rather than it being on private databases that corporations are basically selling and compiling on us. Of course that failed as well. You know, it did a whole bunch of other stuff, but mostly finance, you know, became a financial advisor to try to help people make as much money myself, pursued money. And so it was always about money. I’ve read every book in the local library about money investing. I was insufferable, I always talked about money and investing with everybody in my life. So my friends and family must have been sick of me all the time. This is all I talked about, and it wasn’t until about 12 years ago that I had a business failure that my wife and I were basically discussing what are we going to do with our lives? Like, you know, how are we going to move forward? And we were really concerned about all of the existential problems in the world, right? All of the everything was seems to be going on this path where it’s not just expanding linearly, it was exponential.

Remzi: And so that exponential curve really scared the crap out of us. We figured society’s unstable. And so what we need to do is try to find some kind of security for ourselves. So we thought we would have to maybe bug out, buy some land, become self-sufficient, you know, have solar water, etc., just in case society collapses, you know, at least we can survive. But in walks our eldest daughter, 16 years old at the time, and she basically says to us, shut the f up. Stop talking about all the problems in the world and start looking for solutions because this is her future, you know? We were not concerned about the uncertainty and the chaos of the world, but rather we’re thinking about ourselves and trying to escape and create security for ourselves. But Manda, what kind of life would we have if we were living on our own? That’s not living. I might as well be dead. Really? That was just a stupid idea. Stupid plan. And so, of course, we immediately pivoted and I began to search for solutions. And for me, it was always about incentives and economics, right? What drives people are the incentives that we chase. And money is the thing that we all chase. And there’s always this thing that people say here in America, you know, well, if communism or socialism is so great, then why are they escaping their country and coming to America? They’re chasing the incentives, the money.

Remzi: It’s not that difficult. It’s not that, you know, it’s not that deep here. So changing the incentive structure was primary. And so it began really simply. We were heavily influenced initially by the resource based economy, the idea of the Venus project. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, that notion of, of coordinating human activity, allowing people to be free and making the resources flow in some kind of, you know, holistic scientific way. Sounds very exciting. But from an economics perspective, I couldn’t get past the mechanics: it’s a beautiful vision, but how do we get there? Right? What is that architecture and what does it even look like when you’re there? Who’s making all these decisions? If all, if the scientific method, if all this problems, so to speak, of coordination, distribution are solved, And what the hell? What are we doing? What’s my role in this new game? What is that game and what do I do? And so and so. When we asked the first basic question on that system, we couldn’t answer it: you have this resource-based economic system. Well, then how do you get to live where you live? How do you choose a house?

Manda: Right? The real practical questions.

Remzi: Or how many cars do you have? Like none of the practical questions, you know, this free first come, first serve, you know, free for all model. It sounds free, sounds liberating. But when you actually do the the thinking, the math, you realise there’s, you know, in economics there are trade offs, you know, there is allocation of resources. You can’t just you have, you know, produce if you have a limited quantity of a certain element, well, what goods are you going to make out of that? And so resource based economy didn’t seem to have those answers anyway. So for us, it was just beginning to ask the questions of capitalism. Okay. If capitalism distributes the currency under these conditions, what if we distributed it like this? What if the first question was, what if we just removed labour as an expense from the capitalist equation and made it the creation of currency itself? Like what if that was the incentive? Like whoever does the work gets the money instead of it coming from somebody else’s pocket. Then, and thus began this equation. And so it just began from just asking questions.

Manda:  Marx did something moderately similar, so it feels like you’ve gone on a bit of a parallel line. So, let’s take a step back to let’s have a look at your unpicking of the existing system, because your Substack, I will put links in the show notes to the Substacks that Remzi has written, and they are really coherent of the analysis of what’s wrong with the current system, how we got here, how did we get to what a lot of people, Daniel Schmittberger and others, call Game A, and there was, for a while the concept that Game B was an answer, but I think Game B has largely been sidelined now in favour of something slightly more complex. There are more emergent systems. We can perhaps look at that. So how did we get to where we are? What is a categorisation of where we are in a way that makes it clear the extent to which it is a self-defeating algorithm? And you say that in your SubStacks that capitalism, as it is currently designed, cannot continue forever, and yet it is designed as if it could continue forever, largely because the people within it who want that to be the case. I can’t remember who said it, but it was a long time ago, was it’s very hard to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it.

Remzi: Milton Friedman, I think.

Manda: Was it? (Post edit: It was Upton Sinclair)  And so there are a number of symptoms of people whose salaries depend very much on them, not understanding the fact that capitalism is not compatible with the continuation of complex life on earth. And yet here we are. And so Creditism feels to me like a way forward. Let’s look at, first of all, your concept of game A and how we got there. Can we do that? So you have on your Substack capture first charge later that within our culture, I think this is worth saying that if we read Graeber and Wengrow the Dawn of everything or anything similar to that, we know that indigenous cultures had highly complex cultures that could span city sized aggregations of people, and they didn’t have money and they didn’t have an economy. They had trust based systems of human engagement and value exchange that were not based on individual ownership and accumulation of stuff. And they had the freedom that when the man whose name I can never pronounce it looks like it’s Kadiaronk, but I’m sure you don’t say it like that. But he went off to France just prior to the French Revolution and came back aghast and he was aghast at two things.

Manda: First of all was the hierarchies, and second was the inequality of value. You had people dying of starvation in the streets while the rich were very, very rich. But he also said, ‘Nobody tells me what to do.’ They lived in a system where there was if someone was starving, everyone was starving. If someone had enough, everyone had enough, and nobody told anybody else what to do. And it feels to me that we are this is our birthright. We’re trying to get to it. And capitalism is this desperate, running up a down elevator that is not going to where we’re wanting to go. But someone has got the bright, sparkly things at the top, and we think we just run fast enough, we’ll get there, which sounds like exactly what you were doing—and you stepped off, which is grand. So let’s have a look at how you envisage the evolution of Game A within our Western, Educated, Industrial Rich, Democratic – Weird – but hegemonic toxic culture. Go for it.

Remzi: Thanks, Manda. The article series actually is really good. We put a lot of work into articulating, you know, exactly how we got to where we are. So I would really also refer readers to listeners to those sets of articles because they really are foundational. And I think they would help pretty much anyone to understand and save yourself some time from the journey of having to read all of these economics books and articles and thinkers that I’ve had to consume. We’ve done and condensed them for you. So what I realised was with traditional economics, if we go back and everyone, myself included, I was an Uber capitalist for most of my life because I was really devout and dedicated to the pursuit of money. And so I used the same language, the same justifications as they do. And so and I became a libertarian. So my thinking and my understanding of capitalism was so unilaterally focussed on the productive entrepreneurial, the, you know, the part where somebody comes up with an idea, gets money from capitalists and then, you know, use that money to pay labourers and information and skill and then produce something of value in the world. And so these are value creators. It’s the entrepreneurs, the business people. And so all of a sudden you’ve tied capitalism to business to that whole cycle of employing basically, you know, adding labour to resources. And then you get this beautiful wealth output of wealth. That’s great. Who doesn’t want that? We all do. Right? But that is not capitalism. We skip over the part where the game actually begins.

Remzi: If you’re going to be analysing this like a game, because it is, it has certain features that not many really. It only really has if we’re being real. Three parts. There’s labour, there’s resources, and then there’s the accounting, the money side of it. Yeah. Right. But the money comes from how, what and how does the game of economics begin? And I was reading, um, Bucky Fuller’s book, uh, the, the Crunch of Giants, I think it’s called. And he does a masterful job of using an analogy of a spaceship, you know, using, saying the earth is a spaceship and that what has happened is that we’ve allowed the admirals who’ve taken the staterooms to, you know, to claim the engine and then, you know, the people who are closest to the kitchen to claim the food and the people who are closest to the lifeboat who claim like, that’s, that’s, that’s what’s happened on earth. Our spaceship is we’ve allowed a small group of people to capture the stuff that is the source of life, the source of wealth, source of value for themselves under this weird game of tribute. Like, so what is technically is happening if you remove the abels of ownership and just follow the numbers themselves. What you see has happened is that one entity has created a currency to basically and distributed points to these people who’ve captured the stuff for their stuff. You know, it didn’t start that way with the points. Of course. It started as Graber discovered with to exchange through obligations of credit and debt. Obviously, if that’s your thing and you’re giving it to me, I have to give you something of reciprocal value. And thus begins the relationship of credit and debt.

Manda: Or you might give my cousin’s friend’s child something of value. But because we all live together, it swings around. I think that’s one of the things that’s important – it wasn’t direct barter where I just hunted a wild pig. And you have, shoes that I want and we swap them.  Because we’re a tribe and I bring the wild pig and I give it to everybody. And somewhere over there is somebody who mends shoes. And I know that I will be provided for by the collective. As far as I can tell, there was never a tit for tat. Instead, I am giving of my best to the community, to the collective, knowing that the collective will give me what I need and that becomes a whole different way of looking at things, which it seems to me that’s what Creditism is getting to.

Remzi: Yeah. No, you’re absolutely correct. What David Graeber and many anthropologists have discovered is that there have been many different relationships of how people relate with the resources. But one thing we do know about human nature, or animal nature in general, is that we do have this innate need for fairness and reciprocity. It’s embedded in our relations automatically. And so the notions of, of credit and debt and owing somebody a favour and that, that that’s normal. It’s nothing abnormal there. What happens though is that over time, if those obligations become recorded, quantified through accounting and those accounting ledgers then transcend space and time and one’s own life into the next generation. This is where the relationships have become distorted, and then money enters the game and becomes super confusing. Because I thought, at least for the majority of the people who were engaged in commerce and economics are actually engaged in exchange of what Bucky called the balance of trade, they were playing this game balance of trade. That’s kind of what economics is. We’re exchanging one resource for another in a game of capture. So it sounds normal and fair. And it is when you’re talking about people who have relations and connections, direct connections to the physical resources of their local region. But what happens when you divorce the people who are connected to the resources and somehow have given choice, making and power to some person who lives in another part of the world, who isn’t connected to that community, isn’t connected to that biosphere, doesn’t care about that biosphere?

Remzi: It only cares about the incentive and the points and now sudden enter modern capitalism. This is on a global level, what we have created. Corporations have no boundaries. They can register anywhere. They can do business anywhere. We are limited. You and I can’t  leave our countries easily. They can. They have no borders. Trade has no borders. And so these notions of ownership have essentially come to dominate the game. And we’ve made the game super complex so that to make it difficult to even to reveal itself, you know, so much so that we focus so much more on the other stuff and the productive, like I mentioned earlier, the capitalists and not these actual ownership positions, which is all attribute based. And then you, you layer those positions of capital and then because they’re ultimately accounted for and converted into these value points. And then of course, then you get rulers and kings and, um, states ultimately who, you know, confirm and create the currency units to ultimately to what? To directly reward the people who own the stuff. And that’s exactly what’s happening today. Every single country in the world is involved in creating a currency. And where does it flow? It flows to ownership positions.

Manda: And very few ownership positions.

Remzi: Yeah. Like what are people owning doing? They’re not part of the productive capacity. They’re controlling. They get control, they get power and the points, but they’re not doing any of the actual labour. They’re not necessary is what I’m suggesting. They are just these privileged positions that we have somehow built the game on top of, and forgotten that we’re playing a game of stealing the common resources for value points. That’s the fundamental basis of the game. And so if you want to change economics, if you leave that bit alone, you’re not going to change the game. We’re still going to be fighting over the resources of the world. America is still going to say, I want Greenland, I want this, I want that because it’s embedded in the value structure of the of the points.So that’s part one, game A.

Manda: A couple of questions of that because or at least a couple of things I’d like to expand on. I think one of the things that you got in that Substack is when capture became immortal, and I think this is a really important thing that so much this is the two little fish swimming along and the older fish swims the other way and goes, hey boys, how’s the sea? And they go, what’s the sea? Because they’re in it and they don’t know it’s a thing. And we are so embedded in this hyper complex system. We’ve gone in a relatively short space of time in evolutionary terms, because the Romans had the commodification of land, labour and capital, and they were pretty good at it. You know, part of the reason for the Roman invasion of Britain the second time around, at least for the Boudican revolt, was that they were leveraging interest on loans that they had given to people who had only just encountered money. And the idea that I give you this. And they’d also just encountered taxes. So I’m going to give you these denarii with which you are going to pay the taxes that we tell you that you owe us.

Manda: And then I’m going to come back in five years time, and you’re going to give me some more that you are not allowed to make. Because if you do that, you’re counterfeiting. The whole thing is a way of imposing violence. And that was one of the other things that it seems to me that capitalism is, in the end, the commodification of suffering, and it is designed to elevate to the top the people with the least empathy, because you can’t do that level of, I am basically going to set you up to fail in order that I can take your children into slavery and sell them because they’re the only commodity you’ve got that I really want. You can’t do that if you have any degree of empathy. And we then get to this idea of capitalism as companies are immortal traders, not that they can’t go bust, but once they get to a certain size. We saw in 2008, and 09 that ‘Too Big To Fail’ became a thing. And so talk to me a little bit about the implications of capital and debt not ending with in a normal human lifespan?

Remzi: Perhaps there’s multiple layers there. That last bit is a little bit. I think it might sidetrack us into the currency that we want to talk about a little bit later, but the capture portion of it, right? If somebody has something that you need to survive, you know, the food and the water or whatever it may be, and you don’t, well, then obviously you’re in a disproportionate power relationship, right? They have something you desperately need and they don’t need the trade. And so now what if we what do we see? Trade is a subjective game of power relations. It isn’t neutral. Right. And so capitalism presents itself as, oh, it’s just fair trade. It’s never fair trade. The two parties are almost never equal. So the exchange itself is isn’t fair. One party generally loses, one party wins. And so you have a win lose relationship. And from a mathematical perspective, it’s a mathematician did the math and he said, why capitalism is obviously mathematically always going to be unequal because of the distribution of those exchanges. You multiply those millions of those exchanges and what do you get? You get the distribution that you see in the world of inequality. But see, it’s a power relationship. This is where we can’t ignore that. We can’t just say this is a, you know, natural relationship and somebody has to own the things. It’s simply not true. You know, there is the, the concept of the commons that various, you know, certain indigenous tribes in different cultures have experimented with these kinds of cultures, these games and opportunities and exchanges.

Remzi: But the difference that in our structure and our societies, because of the size, the complexity of it means that the type of game that creditors and represents that tribes and peoples throughout history have discovered and played. The reason why they hadn’t didn’t scale is because of trust, is because those games are only possible as long as all the participants are playing and agree by those rules. But as soon as another group or some other conditions change where the game gets interrupted or the trust layer gets broken. Now you’re playing a whole different game. So this is one of the arguments we’ll make later in the series. If you get far enough into the Substack is that we make is that none of this was possible. So the reason why we’re even talking about this right now is because of technology, because of digital ledgers. Because remember, what we’re discussing here is accounting, record keeping and all traditionally, historically, all record keeping has either been here or on paper. And who holds the paper records? Very small group of people. That means a very small group of people is in charge, not just of the past, technically speaking, the future too. And so there Therein lies this structured, centralised kind of power games that we’ve built our entire, you know, capitalist world on because of these structures of trust. Who’s going to who’s going to control the information has to be some kind of trusted institution. May not answer that last bit of your question, but.

Manda: No, but it doesn’t matter. It was close enough. And it’s brought up other things because we’re almost we’re in Orwellian territory of who controls the present, controls the past, and who controls the past, controls the future. We need trust layers in an ideal world, but what we’ve had, because the thing that’s really one of the many things that’s quite interesting about Trump is he’s exploding the trust layers of the Western hegemonic alliances. And what we’re seeing, I think, as a result, is the extent to which it was only ever a power dynamic, but we pretended there was trust within it. America held the fiat currency, and it held the fiat currency because it had the biggest army. And anyone who threatened that fiat currency was put down very fast. There were reasonable reason to believe that part of the Libyan invasion was because Gaddafi was about to start selling oil in Euros. Iraq Mark one again, they were about to start selling oil in euros, or at least they were going to start selling them to the EU and they were going to stop trading in dollars. And so I agree that trust is where we need to get to.

Manda: But what we are discovering as capitalism, late stage capitalism falls apart, is that it wasn’t so much trust as an agreement to not argue with the guy with the biggest guns, and the other guy with the biggest guns is blowing apart that agreement on their own. And we’re discovering that actually, the guy with a lot of small guns, like the Iranians who have missiles that they can put together basically out of B and Q that cost $1,000 are actually very effective against the big guns. So the whole of the power based structure is falling apart.

So let’s recap. We have a system game A that is essentially power based. It’s extractive. It means that the people who garner an amount of value. It doesn’t take much to multiply that up. I think it was Piketty who was the mathematician who demonstrated G is always greater than R, that that once you’ve got a little bit of capital, the commodification of capital allows you to multiply that and you have to work quite hard. Trump is probably the only person in the world who has ever managed to lose money on a casino. And he still got elected. But leaving that aside, once you’ve got money, it becomes easier and easier to accumulate money and you end up with someone like M*sk, who, if he were to invest his trillion dollars in average 5% return rates of capital, he would be making $1 billion a week. And he’s not doing anything to attract that. He’s not making them. He’s just sucking them out of the economy into his dragon’s hoard. And then he can afford the biggest guns fundamentally. And that process, I think I’m watching Gary Stevenson, who’s a former hedge fund operator over here. He’s very interesting because he was he was very working class, you know, him and he happened to be super bright. And he’s saying, you have to stop this now because otherwise, once you have enough billionaires who are making a million a week, and then they become trillionaires because that’s the nature of the accumulation of capital. The rate at which they will suck value out of the economy is such that there will be nothing left at the bottom. And then we either have total feudalism or the entire top heavy system just falls over. I did a Master’s in regenerative economics and we spent the entire year trying to work out how to create the soft landing of capitalism.

Manda: That wasn’t the diving over the edge of a cliff, and everything explodes into a thousand tiny pieces because people will die, because the food chains are short and fragile. And how do we create an anti-fragile system? And we’re doing the opposite of that at the moment. So let’s get to Creditism because I realise I’m eating time. Unless you want to engage with some of the middle, the second Substack before we get there of how is it that the money works? I think we largely touched on that money is an expression of exchange, storage and accounting of value. And once you have it, it allows you to have more. Once you’re over a certain threshold that buys you your means of survival, then you can start to accumulate. And this is the nature of capitalism. It’s how it’s designed. So how would you how have you designed a system that is more in service to life, in service to the continuation of complex life on earth? Because capitalism, as you have said several times in your SubStacks, is going to eat its own tail. It is a self-terminating algorithm. How do we create the self-perpetuating algorithm instead? Over to you.

Remzi: Yeah. Great question. So let’s not skip over the money part though, because it does create this progression that we can get to. So we can get to Creditism. So they captured the stuff, the resources. Ultimately what happens is you have this accounting of exchange of the stuff that produces the value points. And now you have currency, so to speak. You have this credit and debt relationship. And then because people don’t necessarily always trust the accounting, they might want those units represented in a physical form shells, gold coins, silver coins. And so because trade happens beyond different regions and beyond different cultures, that layer of trust doesn’t exist between the two parties that they can trust each other, just pure accounting. And so they create a physical form for the accounting, enter gold, whatever. And then because of storage, because of safety, it’s not safe to carry around gold, right? Somebody can just take it from you. They can rob you. And so it’s very dangerous actually. And, and people discover, oh, we can’t keep this around us because it’s too, too powerful.

Remzi: And so they give it to what Goldsmiths, they give it to storehouse. They store it in places where they can have some security, some safety. And what they discovered there is that the, the gold and the certificates, the pieces of paper that they issued the receipt essentially saying this is equal to this records your, you know, 100 gold coins that I own. Here you go. And so that certificate, because everyone trusts that Goldsmith, everyone has their gold with them. They trust the certificates because every time they go to the goldsmith, the goldsmith will exchange the certificates and give them the gold coins. And so they develop this basis of trust. But what happens in that process is that these goldsmiths discover that through accounting, they can actually issue more of these receipts than actually exist. And so as long as the people don’t go and claim that more coins from them, they can issue more of these pieces of paper. And so at that moment, the game has changed value or the units of account don’t just come from the exchange of the stuff from actual production and capital in exchange. But now you can actually create the value points themselves.

Manda: Out of thin air.

Remzi: Yeah. Out of accounting, just numbers. Just recording the numbers on a piece of paper makes them real. And of course, stamping them a piece of paper makes them doubly real. Or coin. And so that thus begins, you know, credit creation, what they call credit creation. The idea that you can just conjure up numbers in the currency into existence just because. But it’s very risky because ultimately what they’re doing is leverage, right? They’re in the process of buying and selling goods to essentially what banks these institutions are doing. They’re investing, you know, in these ventures, in ships, going to trade with some other port, and then they would get some of their money back because they invested, etc., etc.. And so the whole entire game is one of, of trading our labour or resources and then invest this notion of investing that you mentioned, you know, weirdly, uh, is, is kind of weird. Let’s take M*sk as an example. You know, he has supposedly a net worth of $1 trillion, right? But what is that trillion dollars composed of? Okay, if he was a normal business person, and none of his companies ever went public and sold stock in this casino of exchange value. What would have his actual capitalist productive value have been a traditional business owner can only recoup what they profit.

Remzi: If you have a profit end of the year, you can distribute it to yourself if you want because you’re the owner. That’s your profit. But if you don’t have profit, obviously you can’t distribute yourself. Well guess what? Tesla didn’t have a profit until like 2020 or 21 or whatever it was. And so all the way up until there as a business person, M*sk would have been basically have not made any money. And yet he was already a billionaire. How? Because he already sold a piece of his company to this casino we call the stock market. And what the stock market represents isn’t true ownership, in that the people who own the stock aren’t collecting value waiting for profit from Tesla to collect value? They’re not getting dividends. Their only interest is in the game of betting on whether or not this stock, this company will be around and be worth more to somebody else just on the asset appreciation of that stock. And so we’ve gone into this weird game of exchange. What are you exchanging now? You’re exchanging an abstract ownership position in an entity that doesn’t even make money.

Manda: And if you can persuade your friends to pretend that it’s worth more than it than it is worth more. And then you bounce back and forth between you. The uprating of the value. I was always waiting for that bubble to burst, but it looked like it was going to burst about 18 months ago. And the hashtag that went round was #BuytheDip. And I think the current generation of people playing in this particular casino have realised that they can keep on inflating numbers infinitely. There is no reason for there to be a crash.

Remzi: Yes. So this is why it happens. So that’s the fundamental like, you know what happens. The actual circulatory engine and game that is played. So once banks discover they can create credit, nations and rulers also discover that that power, they too can do that. But the problem is that they do it. And people know that you’re just creating something out of value. They won’t necessarily value it. And so you have this conundrum. And so you can’t just issue fiat easily and get your people to, to accept it and value it in the game. Certainly not your counterparties, because they’ll know that you created it as fiat. And so we create this very elaborate scheme where banks are creating fiat, and the states pretend to borrow it from them. And thus this whole game of essentially legalising the capture of the resources and making sure that those people who capture the resources, of course, who made all the rules and who have all the top positions of power in every institution that they that they create all the states, all the. And if they got rid of the king, they created senates, whatever they control that too. And so who controls all that? The landowners, the, the property owners, because the game is one of exchanging these various assets and. But it gets more complex. Like I just mentioned, we go from having real assets and goods to these more esoteric abstract assets called currencies, and then stocks and then bonds and then derivatives and then options and then.

Manda: And then crypto.

Remzi: Crypto. And so they’re all abstract units of value in this game of exchange of assets. And so we’re still playing a game of assets. And the currency units are assets. And so in modern times people aren’t aware. But since the United States got off the gold standard even prior to of course, what the US deals in. And every nation that has its own currency deals in is actually direct fiat creation. The mechanics of how that exists is unknown to average people. They just generally don’t know that their countries actually literally spend the money into existence. And so as you and your listeners know, we’ve all played the game of monopoly. Imagine your country is the game of monopoly. It can create as much money as it wants. And so it does. And it creates this pile of money that we see in the thing called the bank. Now, in every country, we have our own institutions of what that bank represents. In the United States, it’s the Treasury Department. They’re the ones who have the the checking account, if you will, of the country. And so that bank, that pile of money that you see in the game of monopoly. Think of it as your country’s checking account like in Scotland. What is that institution like? You guys pay taxes. To whom? In Scotland.

Manda: It’s in the UK and it’s the Treasury and the Bank of England.

Remzi: Oh, okay. Yeah. There you go. So they have an account. So if you go online right now they’ll tell you how much money is in the treasury or in this case, how much physical bills, if you will. You can see in the bank in the game of monopoly. But what you have to understand is that that money that you see in the bank isn’t counted as part of the money in circulation because it hasn’t been spent yet. And so they don’t count it. You can see it, of course, it’s accounted for, but it’s not counted as part of the total money supply in circulation because it hasn’t yet been spent. But the mechanics are is that the government has the power and does, of course, can add as much money it wants into that pile called the bank out of fiat, because there’s just numbers. Okay. So when your country spends the money into the game, it goes into circulation, it goes into our bank accounts, the numbers go up, the numbers go up in the in the banks savings account. In America, it’s called a reserve account in your country. I don’t know what it’s called in UK, but it might be reserves.

Manda: Yeah. It’s the Bank of England.

Remzi: In America it’s called US reserves. And so all US dollars or money in the US are basically numerical digital reserves. So it flows there. And then of course your bank says oh yeah man this account went up, you know, 10,000 because the government paid Manda. The government sent 10,000 into the bank’s reserve account. And now the bank just increases the numbers on your account, because those 10,000 in their savings account represent your money. Okay. So more money is in the game, right? When they tax you, money goes out. It’s simple as that. Now the government creates this game where they say, okay, look, we just spent an extra in America. They spend an extra 2 trillion more than they taxed. We just spent an extra 2 trillion. There’s an extra 2 trillion sitting on people’s savings accounts. That’s not good because what do people do with their money? They do. The two things that you’re allowed to do in the game is consume or invest. And so if they consume, it will cause inflation because you might compete against a limited basket of goods that could cause inflation, or you might compete to invest it in stocks and bonds and real estate. That too will cause inflation. So to prevent that extra 2 trillion from going into the game, into those two areas where it only can go, they suck it out by saying, hey, what if instead, you know, you move your money from your savings account and you move it to a savings account with the government, with our central bank, we’ll call it a bond instead.

Remzi: And we’ll pay you guaranteed interest on that money. And once the for a fixed period of time, we’re going to lock your money away. So you can’t spend it because if it’s sitting in your savings account, we know you’re going to spend it or invest it because nobody invests in dollars. Nobody, you know, gets their check savings account to $1 billion. Yeah, nobody does that because it inflates and deflates. It loses value. Right. So you always want to move your money into assets that appreciate in value, not depreciate like currency does. And so they create these bonds. The money goes out from our checking account to the central bank where it’s safe. They give you interest to those accounts, but they pretend that the money that you moved from your savings account to the bond was deposited into the treasury, but it’s all accounting Manda all they did is change the numbers. The money doesn’t actually go into that pile into the bank because it’s still in the game. It’s actually over here. It’s in the savings account. It’s on their ledger. It’s on the net worth. It didn’t disappear. It didn’t get respent. What was respent was new money. It’s extra. The numbers are going up. Bonds went up. Those are assets. Assets are going up. The entire game of capitalism is one in which we have a constant spending of labour, extraction of resource, combine them into assets, and then layering on top of those real assets, fake assets to play this weird game of circulation.

Remzi: Because all of our lives depend on circulation. Because without money we can’t. Because we use money for two things to consume as a unit of exchange for the goods and services that we need to provision our lives and live. I need money. We all need money every day. Basically, that is, if everything that we are going to acquire has to have an exchange of currency, that means that somehow currency has to flow to us. But if the only way in which currency flows to the majority of the players who are not owners is through their labour, but then you don’t offer enough labour opportunities for the players. They’re going to revolt. They’re going to look to change the game. They’re going to look at the game and say, oh shit, this is not workable anymore. Basically, that’s what I did. You know, the notion of automation and the jobs basically potentially collapsing. That was one of the impetuses for designing Cretinism was that we have to figure out a different way of distributing currency. If the if the system isn’t going to solve that problem because we’re playing musical chairs, well, we need a better distribution of the currency, obviously. Right. And what I discovered was that the whole structure was a game of power that is being held in place because people lack imagination, and they haven’t understood yet the tools available to us, and they don’t care enough. They just didn’t know how else to issue a credit and basically to play a different game of money. And so that’s where we’re at.

Manda: Brilliant, I love this. It also seems to me that we are locked in a system where governments have been able to pretend that they were just like households and have omitted the minor detail that they are the people who make the money. If you and I make money, we get locked up because that’s counterfeiting. But they make the money. They have an infinite source of the money. Then they tell us they haven’t got enough taxes and they can’t possibly spend any more. It’s complete and utter nonsense. This is modern monetary theory writ large. Where we get to is I think the concept of fiat currency is worth unpicking a little bit, because it’ll become relevant when we get to Creditism. At the moment, the UK pound sterling, the EU euro, the dollar, Chinese currencies have a certain agreed value that everybody within a certain bandwidth agrees on. If a government other than the US, and I’m really interested to hear what you think about the US doing this, if the UK government. If Andy Burnham, who started as the new Prime Minister today, were to decide to double the UK government’s creation of money and pour it into the economy. He could do that. I don’t think that would create inflation because you and I could discuss inflation, but we might upset the listeners because it could get quite geeky quite quickly. But inflation depends on a number of things at the moment. We have inflation because the oil price is rising. There’s a lot of variables.

Manda: But they could they could, for instance, increase the minimum wage. And I don’t think that would create inflation at all because the things that people on the minimum wage buy are not in scarce supply. They could pay farmers properly for the stuff that they make. They could pay farmers to go regenerative. They could actually properly fund the NHS. And it’s none of that money. If we look at the economy as a great big bathtub, they are doubling the taps essentially for the water to go in. And at the moment, the amount of water going in has been pinched off by austerity progressively since 2010. And therefore in order to keep the money supply stable, ordinary people have had to borrow more from the banks, because that’s the only other source of bringing money into the money supply. If the government were to open the taps to double, people could pay off their debts, the banks would not have as much and the bond markets would go ballistic and the value of the pound would tank. And that’s the argument at the moment, as far as I can tell. That is the argument against imposing modern monetary theory, or Keynesian answer – the vigilante bond markets would mean that Andy Burnham survived less time than the lettuce. I don’t know if you remember, but when Liz Truss was prime minister, she tried something equivalent. She went, okay, we don’t care about the markets. We’re going to double the amount of money the government makes, and we’re going to give it all to the banks, because we’re going to remove all restraints on bank bonuses.

Manda: You guys can have the lot and even the banks said, no – you can’t do that. And the pound fell off the edge of a cliff and the lettuce outlived Liz Truss.

So in the any transition from existing fiat currencies to something that works, we have to nullify the impact of the bond markets. And I’m really curious. We’ll get to this in a while because it seems either we go for a global currency, we ban bond markets, we just take bond markets and say, you can’t do this anymore. You guys just you just have to cease to exist. You’re not allowed to trade. Or we agree with all of the other major currency holders that we’re going to shift the way that money is created. I don’t see any other way around it. And all of those, particularly the obvious one, is telling hedge funds that they can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry, bond markets, you’re just not making money out of trading currency. That’s not a thing because we’re heading for extinction and there are no bond markets on a dead planet, so just stop. However, you have created Creditism as an answer to capitalism. And I think you have done a side run around the bond markets, and I’m really interested to hear how it works. So explain to us Creditism and we’ll get to the fiat currencies and how we’re going to nullify the bond markets towards the end, I think.

Remzi: Yeah. No it’s wonderful. What you just talked about is the difficulty of using the existing system is because what you’ll notice is that it has issuance, it has distribution of the currency, the numbers can go up and they do go up and the state can print more. MMT, by the way, isn’t something that’s applied or it exists already monitored and monitored. It’s just telling you that, hey, states have this power, they’re employing it already. Here’s how they’re doing it. And so all you have to do is a citizen is look at where they’re spending the money. Those are choices. They don’t have to spend it. They’re like in the United States, we don’t have to create the money and spend it to arms, to the military. That’s a choice that we make. It’s not. It’s something that we have to find that money somewhere. No, no, we don’t have to find anything the money’s conjured up into existence already. It’s already happening. MMT isn’t something that somebody applies. It’s just a lens realising that it already works this way. And so. But there’s trade offs. If you were like you suggested, to double the issuance of the kerosene distribution, the question is, okay, where’s it being distributed to? And because this game is one of creation circulation deletion, but it’s being distributed, that circulation process is distributing the currency in places.

Remzi: And so the question is where is it distributing. And then you need redistribution schemes like taxes in order to make sure that if you want to continue playing the game, you have to redistribute the currency in such a way that everyone can play. But see, once you get to that design, understanding that you can control this thing, that there is distribution happening here and that it can be political, it can be Conscious. Then the question is, yeah, like where do you want it distribute? Do you want it to just be distributed equitably or do you want to create inequality? And so they don’t want us to know that this is a power that exists. This distribution is already happening. They would rather us pretend that it’s natural distribution based on the dynamics of the market and free trade. And that’s that, buddy. And nothing we can do about it.

Manda: It’s just this kind of force of nature, like gravity, and we have no control over it.

Remzi: Yeah. So what credit is saying, okay, if states countries do have the power to issue their own numbers, then what if instead they issued them under different conditions that didn’t require even circulation? How would you do that? Here’s how you distribute the currency. How well you know you can do it as a universal amount, like a universal basic income, a certain amount of money to every citizen in your country automatically gets distributed. Then you can eliminate all those social programs that you have to determine. We should give it to this mother, but not that mother or you know, this person, but not that person. Stop it. Just give everyone a baseline of currency because we all need currency to choose what we want to consume, to be able to live. So since we all need it, make sure that it distributes equitably to every person to guarantee life okay in existence. So that’s number one. So now you have this income, you have your own currency, you know, and then you can issue more and you can say anyone who actually is productive, the people who are learning, playing what’s valuable in the world. Every time that you are self-actualizing that you’re becoming a better, more potentially productive member of society, that’s valuable. Maybe the value wasn’t extracted and given to society yet, but the potential is there and eventually it will be. So learning, playing and working are valuable activities that would collect more of the currency. And so again, because the society, in this case, the state has the power and the right to issue these value points. It does so. And so where do they come from? Again, they come from the game just like in sports. The participants who earn it, who you know, verify and claim the activity, collect the points directly. It doesn’t come from a boss. It doesn’t come from somebody else’s pocket. It doesn’t come from the treasury. Okay. None of that is even necessary. It’s just created just like in the game of monopoly. Where did the money come from? It gave it to you. Simple. Not that complex, buddy.

Manda: But my question is, who decides? So suppose my partner is in a wheelchair. This is not the case. But suppose that was the case, and I gave half of my time to caring for this individual who decides. And then I have to find someone for the other half of the time so I can go off and, I don’t know, make, hey, we were making hay yesterday so I can go and mow the fields because we don’t want to use fossil fuels. We’re doing it all with scythes. How do we. That’s not true either. But, you know, I’m looking forward to a future where it might be how who decides in this system what is valuable and what isn’t, and so isn’t an hour of work. Whatever you’re doing with that hour worth a unit of the currency or an amount of the currency and who decides? I have a friend who used to live in an intentional community, and she spent a lot of time gathering and chopping wood because they were in a place that’s very cold in the winter and got quite cross with the people who decided that gathering flowers for the altar was the same amount of work as gathering and chopping wood all afternoon. And yet I’m fairly certain the people who were gathering flowers for the altar felt that they were doing useful, constructive and similarly valued work. How do we establish what’s valuable? Because it seems to me that the person who makes the decision has the power, and you’re putting a lot of trust on their internal capacity for self-regulation and not abusing that power.

Remzi: Yeah. You bring up the one area that’s not going to be perfect, but it is it’s okay because what the to solve the problem. You basically have a standard measure of value per work, so that equal the same work can get will get paid the same no matter where it is done in your community. Or if we do the whole world, the world. But that there is another element here to Manda. The third layer of value distribution in the game is. So you got universal basic income. You have a credit for your participation. And the third tranche is bonus, which is essentially determining, okay, the person did that work. We’re not going to debate too much whether or not we think it’s valuable. We’re going to trust that individual in the community that they thought it was valuable enough to do. And so it was done. And because all individuals have limitations on their time, you can’t do two things at once. You can only do one thing with your time, right? So you either, you know, making hay or getting firewood, you can’t do them at the same time, at least personally, you know, you’re a robot could, but I mean, a robot. You can be over here, your robot can be over there, but you can’t. And so because we’re all limited through our time, it means that the amount of potential, say, cheating or whatever, or, or not real value creation that we can do is limited. And so the what happens if some community or individual is kind of gaming the system where they’re pretending to produce value, but other communities don’t really think it’s that valuable. What has happened? Well, what’s happened is that that person or that community might have gotten a little bit more credit than they deserved this period. Who cares?

Remzi: It’s not going to impact you and limit your ability to you still have your own currency. So yes, you may now because they have a little bit more, they may be able to consume a little bit more of the communal pie than they otherwise could have. But is that break the game? Does it end the opportunity for other people to do so? No. And so it isn’t perfect. You’re right. And there are design ideas and principles that that particular part of the model is going to be experimented with and needs a lot more attention on. But it doesn’t break the game. It doesn’t ruin anything. And then of course, having that third tranche, that bonus really levels the playing field, because the bonus is determination after the fact, where various councils, groups, industries can say, hey, what was the purposes this year for our industry? What were the goals that we’re going to, you know, be incentivising these producers to achieve this year? And so for your bike manufacturer, it could be reduced the amount of labour input so that we can free humans to do other things. Okay, great. You know, you reduce your labour. Can you reduce your energy inputs? Can you make the bikes last longer, etc., etc.. So it’s never going to be who sells the most bikes. That might be one metric in the determination of how much bonus to distribute to these members, but it’s always going to be based on human purposes, not profit.

Remzi: Like today’s system is really straightforward, subjective exchange. That’s it. Like, you know. Yeah. Boom trade and you’re done. Yeah. We’re here. We have to think about, well, what is it we’re trying to do? Like, what do we want these of course we want bikes, but how do we want them? How do we want them to be made? And so the considerations of purpose is an intentional design principle in Creditism. Now what you’ll notice Manda happening here is you’ve got three flows, if you will, like faucets of currency going to each individual. And we can adjust those. And so if we find that the universal amount is either too little or too much, it can be changed. And as it’s changed, it’s just like in sports, the rule making body of sports, once they make the rules, they change the points. Everybody follows those rules. And it’s fair because it applies to everybody. Same thing here in Creditism. These design features aren’t permanent. These are a moment in time represent our cultural and economic history and moment that we’re in. So over time, it’s possible that these flows could either disappear even, and we might actually get to that resource based economy where money actually completely dissolves.

Remzi: But before we can get there. This design principle of issuing currency credit directly to individuals, having it circulate only for personal exchanges, meaning my currency would exchange with your currency if I’m exchanging my laptop to you. But here’s where it makes credit ism elegant is that the currency deletes when you use it to purchase something in the marketplace. Because we’ve removed the ownership positions, nobody owns that laptop yet hasn’t been purchased. Society produced it. The producers have already gotten paid. They got universal amount. They got amount for their for their labour directly by the system. Right. It doesn’t require a redistribution through the price mechanism. And they also get bonus their so-called profits. So they have incentives to do what they’re doing. And so now you’ve got the same structures, capitalism in the sense of you got incentives, you got prices, you have markets, you have allocation of resources based on the prices. And now you actually have a free exchange of the goods and services, but you also have a free exchange of basically what’s being produced, no longer states and capitalists determining what we should build and where we should spend labour. It’s you individually deciding where I should spend this labour. It’s my labour to spend. I’m not going to sell it to somebody else to choose to spend it anymore. I get that choice.

Remzi: And so now, and I heard in one of your podcasts where you said something about Labour being, I think I have it quote here, where human attention is the most powerful force in the planet. Yes. Our capacity, I think, at this moment in the world is being underutilised. And, you know, as Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ attest to, a lot of it is, is doing stuff that actually isn’t producing any real value in the world its financial value, its exchange value, but not real value. And so we’re under-utilising the most valuable asset in economics, which is our labour. And so what a credit system does is it frees that separates that from the again, it says it’s yours now. No one can ever buy it again. Society can incentivise you, but no person can purchase it. You get to determine where you learn, where you work, where you play, and you. And wherever you do participate. Every club, every co-op, every community, you get an equal say because you’re equal member of those communities. So you can step into different communities, different clubs, different co-ops. You don’t have to, you don’t have to participate. But when you do, you get the value directly and there will be no more. This notion of having to think about like, you know, to invest your money to make more money, you won’t have to worry about money ever again because it flows to you for existence.

Remzi: You’ll never run out. Because it constantly flows. A little bit of it circulates and all of it eventually deletes, because eventually we either use it to consume things immediately, or the things that we purchase just, you know, do thermodynamics break over time, your laptop eventually becomes useless and worthless. And so the money, the currency, it’s elegant. It’s just a simple, fair way to distribute currency. You can play this forever. Any people can play this game of credit creation of value distribution and exchange and infinitely fair way. And so it can begin and rebegin if you need it to. If for some reason there was some kind of a, an event that deleted all of our data. So what? Yeah, you can instantly begin the game all over again. Here guys. Here’s an initial allocation of the currency units. Here’s the new quantities that we’re going to issue into. And let’s play the game again. Not that hard. And so this is the design of credit is is one in which the currency is created a little bit circulates, but ultimately deletes. It clears because there aren’t any more owners. So that’s the the real key is the is the clearing the deletion mechanism. Without that, we’re in the same challenges and problems as capitalism.

Manda: Exactly. Yes. You’ve just created a new currency. Which stablecoin is is busy doing. Yeah. So it seems to me for this to work, it has to be global because otherwise, you know, I come from Scotland, I don’t live there at the moment, but Scotland might end up independent. And I have spoken to people who are really interested in Scotland producing its own currency. The coda is that it has to be acceptable as tax by the central Scottish Government, and they have to accept English currency and euros at a constant value because otherwise exchange You houses set up on the border and everything falls apart very quickly. If we are to have a currency that deletes. I don’t see how it works. If it’s not a global currency that deletes. Is that your thinking?

Remzi: It was my thinking initially. Manda. But it’s not my thinking anymore. And my team. Okay. You know, it would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the transition strategy to get to creditors doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to be playing creditors in full for it to be credited.

Manda: Okay. Talk me through the transition, then.

Remzi: Sure. So let me explain. As long as a group of people have reclaimed a set of resources that they manage in commons, that’s the beginning of creditors. And so, yes, that particular group of individuals in a legal sense, are still owning those resources because they are the decision makers. They might have legal title, they may have pooled them together in some kind of a legal structure or a trust or something like that. But it’s still Creditism Because they essentially comment those resources. And so because of the decision making is Commoning, they can begin playing their own game. Now remember, because capitalism is a game of trade, of balance, as Bucky said, a country, if they wanted to play beyond just individual communities and pockets of communities claiming resources. Commons. We call this reclaiming our Commons. Credit is a monetary system where we can reclaim our credit instantly. You know, just like MMT is trying to also explain, here’s how it works. And once you know, you can, of course, design a different credit system to reclaim the currency in your country, but you still have strategies to reclaim the commons. But there are many legal ways that people are doing that already. They’re creating various funds, venture, you know, for purpose funds. People are already willing to kind of gift their existing land or maybe housing if they have, and into these various trusts where they can be then distributed for purpose rather than for profit.

Remzi: And so you can change the nature of organisations and commitment pooling to slowly take away the resources from the for profit world. So that’s the beginning of escape of capitalism, if you will, because creditors and represents a game where we’re chasing our purposes, like our what are our human purposes for using these resources in this labour now, because we’re playing that game of balance. If you institute creditors at a national level, your country still has to play the game of balance. Yeah, you still have to have an external currency and you’re still going to have imports and exports and accounting based on that imports. And that doesn’t change. And so it makes the transition for a country more difficult. And the conditions in which it can achieve it more difficult because it’s fraught with political challenges as well. If you attempted to change to Creditism too quickly in your country, it’s possible that a, you know, a country like the United States can impose all kinds of trade restrictions on you or in like in the case of Gadhafi in Libya and all these other just flat out just kill you and just prevent you from actually doing it.

Manda: Invade. Yeah.

Remzi: Yeah.

Manda: So, yes.

Remzi: So I think or we think rather that the way that we actually get to Creditism is to educate the people. But at the same time, by building the digital ownership structure of the world, by incentivising people to join a network, at least that’s what we’re going to attempt to do with Common Planet, incentivising them to join the network to get this new currency unit so that it can begin to have the digital tools for exchanges by recording all the stuff that they own their inventory, mapping out the real world and all the other houses and other assets of the world, and getting them onto more communal for purpose ledgers and slowly incorporating and incentivising people to join and understand this new structure. And over time, we can accelerate that by hopefully by introducing some of these, you know, different monetary flows at a national level, you can begin as simply as a universal basic income because countries already have redistribution. Sure, it might complicate the redistribution schemes in the beginning, but it’s possible at least you can quickly solve the challenge of getting money to people’s hands. Right? And inflation and all those other challenges, they’re just challenges. They’re not going to break the system. So what that your currency inflated 1,020%? Who cares? It’s, you know, 80% of something is better than 0% of nothing, right? So if the if you got $1,000, but all of a sudden it only has $800 of buying power because of inflation, you still have $800.

Remzi: You know, before you had nothing. Anyway, I digress. So the way in which we get to to a common planet is we slowly shifts people’s attitudes and their value. You know, where they’re putting their, you know, put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. Right now, people are putting their money in what? Retirement accounts? Where do those monies go? They go into investments. Into what? Well, they’re investing into pipelines, into bombs, into blowing things up just so that we can rebuild them, just so we can keep the continuing game of capitalism. So we the whole structure is, uh, is broken. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that, that this vision of basically exchanging our labour in a different way is, I think the path to how we transition. But I don’t think it’s going to happen at a planetary level, at least not without this foundational basis of us slowly reclaiming our commons and our purposes together. First. If we don’t do that, I don’t know that we can get enough momentum at the political level to to do it that way. I was reversed before I was thinking, if we just educate the people and give them the choice and, you know, they’ll just do it, but I’m not certain about that anymore. Given the political environment we’re in anymore, they seem to be too captured by the capitalists. There doesn’t seem to be much democracy in politics at the moment.

Manda: If there ever was. But that’s a separate conversation.

Remzi: If there ever was. Right.

Manda: All right. So talk to us about Common Planet and what you’re doing with that. And particularly, I’m really curious, have you got an internal sense of a critical mass of any population that would be enough to gain the momentum towards Creditism and away from capitalism? Because it seems to me partly because I’m just reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point, that this is a place where there will be a tipping point and we won’t know exactly what it was until we passed it. But if we could get enough people engaged in this, it’s so much more attractive than work yourself to the bone, pay bills and then die, which is what capitalism offers everybody who isn’t part of the Epstein class, frankly, then it could move quite fast. So tell us about Common Planet and tell us about your theories underlying it.

Remzi: So Common Planet Foundation is a non-profit in or in the United States, and our mission is to give a world that works for everyone where, you know, like Bucky’s mission, right? Where we can get to a place where it is cooperative and every person has, I think this was your vision as well, has the opportunity to self actualise where you’re actually free and you housing is guaranteed income, you know, comes from existence, the universal flow. So you’ll never have to worry about money. And it’s just represents a, a world of like what we say, life, liberty and freedom. Your life is assured because you always, you will never have to worry about currency and currency being a tool, a unit of measure, of unit, of exchange for the stuff. And so the fact that you don’t have to worry about having access to the, the, you know, the social production, that society that we produce together, that God has gifted this, this planet with, you’ll always have access to. That means that you’re an equal member of society and that you at least have that foundation. So that has never existed before. This notion of potential for the end of essentially poverty, which is, you know, mathematically unnecessary, especially if we’re talking about currency here. It is true that the material production of the world may not always be able to adequately sustain us, but not at this moment. At this moment, I believe we have enough.

Manda: We definitely do.

Remzi: Not just ingenuity of, you know, the resources, but we’re actually producing it right now. So that’s the design that is good. So Common Planet Foundation exists as an educational institution. Our mission is twofold really is to educate the public on creditors. And that’s going to be my main job. So I got to get better at that. Fine. This is really, really one of the reasons why I think having written, you know, the stuff down and taking that time to, to truly think about it intimately and deeply and to express it in the way that we did was key, but now we have to take that further. We need to produce short videos to explain this in a way that is quicker for people to understand. So that will come. We know we’ll have our own podcast as well. So our mission is education on Creditism. But at the same time, we’re also we’re not going to wait. We’re not going to just tell the people about this design system and then let them, you know, try to figure it out on their own.

Remzi: We’re actually going to build a planetary network where we’re going to invite people to join. And so it’ll be free to join. We are in the beginning, we’re issuing what we call now points because we’re still not technically developed. And of course, the network is not established yet enough to even have a network currency. But over time, the points and the network will issue a currency unit, a token of sorts to its members, so that it will have its own unit of exchange that we can begin to play the game with. It won’t have the full mechanics of Creditism of some of the deletion mechanics, because we haven’t reclaimed the Commons yet. Right. And so there’s. But it’s okay because there’s only a limited issuance of the currency. We’re not actually fully playing Creditism. We’re not going to give you a full universal income. Right. We can give a universal flow, a certain quantity of currency to every member, but has to be small. Otherwise it’ll make the unit, you know, useless and worthless. If we’re just giving out too much.

Manda: And you’re extending with each other because my local supermarket is not going to take this any more than they would take monopoly money.

Remzi: Correct. So there are design criteria here. It seems to be the case that because it will be digital and if we don’t have the capacity and this may be again, a design choice we haven’t yet made yet. But if we are incapable of preventing the digital currency from being exchanged on the markets, like any other token, like Ethereum or like Bitcoin, then it’ll have a market price, you know, in fiat, okay, in the exchanges and we won’t be able to control that price, and that’s okay. But here’s one thing we can do, though. Manda is that my CTO has come up with a really ingenious idea. Adam Stallard we can create an index price based on a basket of the top ten currencies. And so once you’ve set a price, an index price, an exchange rate, if you will, of the unit within the network at this price, at that moment, every day, as you know, the currencies of the world, they exchange with one another, right? Because internally your UK pound is a measure. It’s £1 is always £1. Sure. But externally your measure versus our measure, the US dollar, they’re actually assets with each other. They’re no longer measurements anymore. Because you know if they were true measurements one mile in a kilometre, the rates don’t change between the measurements because they’re measuring the same thing. But guess what? In capitalism, the currencies are also measuring the same things. They’re measuring assets other things of value, right? Except that between each other, curiously, they also have different exchange rates. Why? Because they’re also commodities, that’s why in capitalism, because everything is an asset.

Manda: Somebody manages to make a profit.

Remzi: Yeah. Anyway, so because our network has the opportunity to set an index price because it’s not tied to a specific currency, it means that that index exchange rate will always more or less be stable. It’ll always be high and it won’t have the like. Initially I thought about making it a dollar, you know, for simplicity’s sake, because the dollar is the global reserve currency. I thought that would be the wisest move. But just now, given in light of what’s happening in the world, maybe not so wise, because if it so goes the dollar, so would our currency. And that’s actually that would be, you know, a failure point to prevent that, we have an index price that is foolproof in the sense that it’s exchange rates can be quantified and listed on our network, but we can’t force people to exchange at that value. So we can say to members, we would like for you to. Use this currency, this unit at this value. But we. Of course, we can’t force you. But here’s what could happen. Manda over time, if we’re successful and people do join the network in good numbers, and they begin to use this currency to sell their goods and services with each other at whatever value they choose, assuming that’s values higher than the market price. What could happen over time is that the market exchange price could come closer and closer to that index price, because if there’s an opportunity for somebody to purchase the currency outside the network and use it in network at a higher rate, they’re going to do that, right? People are always chasing values. And so that’s the structure that we’re going to create. Those are the incentives we’re going to be using. And ultimately, to your point about where that tipping point is, I have no idea. I mean, where would you think it would be? It’s hard to know it.

Manda: I would think 10 or 20%, but I don’t know. I would need to go and look, because there’s been a lot of local currencies that have tried to do.

Remzi: It’s exactly the.

Manda: Same. The concept is not dissimilar. Specifically the ones that have got a degree of demurrage, which is what you’re saying when, you know, once you spend it, it’s gone. I’m really interested in what happens when you instigate demiraj and you’ve got it trading on the open market. That strikes me as a car crash waiting to happen. The bond markets have decided to trade in your currency and go, well, you know what, guys? These are actually not worth anything anymore. They’re not going to be happy. But how do they express their not happiness, I don’t know. I mean, this is part of we need total systemic change. We need to get to a place where people are free to emerge into something a lot more self-conscious than we have been in the past. We’re going to need a means of value exchange, and it is going to have to function in the way that your Creditism is going to function. The transition is the bit that I find really, really interesting is how practically do we step from A to B, and you’re at least thinking about it and trying it so people can go to Common planet.org and they can join up and see where it goes. And at the moment it does not cost you anything.

Remzi: We’re just launching it now. So they’ll be able to join by early August. We’ll be onboarding okay early members. So you have to apply but we’ll accept you.

Manda: Okay. There’s a link in the show notes.

Remzi: So yeah, anyone can join.

Manda: Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t cost you anything.

Remzi: Yeah. It’s free. There’s no currencies or no tokens or anything like that. Yeah. Right now it’s just it’s a nothing right now we’re really starting at the beginning. You know, it starts with obviously with identification, you know, making sure that you’re real.

Manda: An actual person.

Remzi: Because we can’t start something like this and, and just, uh, and issue points and currencies to, you know, people, if they’re going to sign up ten times, it just ruins the whole thing, right?

Manda: Yeah, totally. And that in itself strikes me as quite an interesting hurdle to pass, because you could hit a bot farm in, you know, Sardinia or somewhere where they, they do literally flood you with a thousand or 10,000 or 100,000, or the entirety of ChatGPT just decides to go for it. What do you do? I was listening to Tristan Harris the other day talking about I can’t remember, but it was a training system in China that was training the AI and a separate department, which was the securities department, suddenly noticed a channel from the outside and a lot of activity, and thought they’d been hacked, and discovered that the AI, instead of training, had decided to take the entirety of the Nvidia power that it had been given to train with and mine cryptocurrencies with it.

Remzi: Yeah, I saw that. It was nuts.

Manda: And what did it want the money for? And so it could decide that what it really wants is your credit system thing. And it could probably create quite a lot of plausible people. And you are going to have to work out how do you do the checks of are you actually a real human being?

Remzi: Well, this is why we’re moving forward, is that our CTO has that application. Adam has been developing an ID protocol for quite some time. And while it is robust enough to launch this particular, you know, network, there are going to be, you know, identity protocols and certifications and such that go beyond that, right? That already confirm our interactions at the national level. And so there’s other people working on that bit too. So we can add those more powerful identity protocols into this, onto this architecture. But for to start the network, what we have now is sufficient to prevent all those, all those bots. And it’s interesting you mentioned AI because this is what’s so important about Common Planet and creditors in particular is because what is the incentive structures of the game right now is just we’re just chasing the numbers in profit. They’re completely devoid of any actual, um, purpose. Like we’re not trying to build a factory so we can make bikes. We want to build a factory so we can make profit. And so the entire, uh, question of whether or not we should invest and the, the risks and whatever have everything to do with just the a profit. Rather, it has nothing to do with actually producing the bikes. And so it’s an insanity. Now we unleash this powerful tool of AI to uncover opportunities for profit. And. And we couple this Manda on top of a world not only where we have created a tradable casino of the stock market. We have at present created a tradable market for what’s going to happen in the world.

Manda: For the imaginary stuff. Yes, yes.

Remzi: That’s insane. Now all of a sudden, people can bet not just on corporations and their whatever productive potential profit making bullshit and that race.

Manda: But the futures of what they might make.

Remzi: Now they’re betting on real world activities. That means you can manufacture real world activities just for the bet. That has nothing to do with anything else in the world. Meanwhile, that bet could be like, I bet you that you know that America is going to send a nuclear bomb in Iran, and it happens. And that person who made the bet, of course, is going to win. It just boggles my mind how crazy capitalists can be to allow a thing like Corsi to exist as insanity. They are literally shooting themselves in the foot. And earlier you mentioned about the the bond market and all this other potential disruptions. Now, because of the nature of capitalism, is already one of ever inflating assets, a combination of abstract and real. If those don’t inflate in tandem, you get booms and busts. And so the structures already are unstable. Any activity that we do or transitionary strategies that we might employ, it can easily disrupt them because they’re disrupting themselves all the time. And so us disrupting them would be easy. Like take our money out of banks, not pay certain debts. I mean, the whole entire structure depends on the flow of those numbers continuing. Otherwise, the whole thing just cracks. Because if I don’t get the numbers, but I have to pay them and now I can’t get to them anyway. And then there’s lawsuits. And so the whole thing just breaks. By the way, I’m not for breaking. I’m not for chaos. I want a peaceful transition where we take what we have and keep it and build on top of it and free people, remove the bullshit jobs, move the bullshit, work free people and now say, hey, what is it that you really want to do in the world? Go spend your time doing that instead.

Manda: Yeah, because almost everybody, given the choice, does something creative. That’s one of the things that we discover.

Remzi: Or nothing, even doing nothing would be better than doing something that’s destructive.

Manda: Yes, quite.

Remzi: Or nothing. And pretending to do something. You know, all these weird recirculation games that we have of, of finance, insurance and taxes. Yeah. So that’s also thinking Creditism, by the way, taxes don’t exist in the same way as a country can distribute its currency to its people, it can do the same thing to its communities. And because the currency itself deletes upon purchase. All communities need to provision themselves. They have to buy steel. They have to buy cement and bricks and other stuff to build buildings, schools and roads or whatever it is that they want, whatever they think they need, however they want to provision themselves. But if you distribute the currency mathematically based on population to each community, and then you have to worry about redistribution and taxes because you have a flow of currency directly to each community. And of course, it’s going to delete. Eventually they’re going to exchange it for stuff. And now they have stuff they’ve spent, you know, the labour is spent. It’s incentive, you know, goes to the workers. So you don’t have to pay a community doesn’t have to worry about where are we going to get the money to pay teachers? You don’t have to worry about it. The money isn’t the limitation, it’s the teachers. Do you have enough people? Do they have the skills and are they willing to do the work? If not, no amount of money is going to change that. Yeah, so we’ve got it backwards. So it’s not the money that’s limited. You know, it’s always been the labour and the resources.

Speaker 3: The people.

Remzi: Always.

Manda: We’re going to have to start. We are so far over time. But this has been really interesting. Remzi thank you. Thank you. I’m so impressed that you’ve got this together. You’ve got it running early August. If people want to they can sign up by a year from now. It’ll be really, really interesting to see what you’ve got to. And because the old system is crumbling and we don’t, none of us want it to crash because that will be extremely unpleasant for almost everybody. Once it starts to fall apart, the dominoes will go very quickly. So having something and that’s there emerging already that people can begin to work with is one of the key points of our existing challenge, I would say. So thank you for creating something. Was there anything else that you wanted to say to people? Any websites you want to send them to? I’m going to have links to your Substacks and a link to Common Planet. I link to your LinkedIn and to you on Substack. Is there anything else that you would like to tell people about before we close?

Remzi: No. That’s it. You know, I would just say stay tuned, you know. Please pay attention. Uh, there is something here. This design principle is within our power. I personally feel that it’s inevitable, because I feel that the design of currency was always kind of aiming towards this decentralised space. Is that. And I also believe that none of this was possible prior to modern digital record keeping. I know computers have been around for a while now, but that comfortableness of understanding about what the you know, what the potential real, you know, power of the computers. It’s not just simple record keeping. It’s a truly secure, trustless way to store data that has been now developed and being built. So all the digital tools are here. Now. It’s just a matter of us educating the public. So I would ask that people tune in and do please engage with the Substack, because that is the most recent, clearest description of what we’re talking about, as well as the history of economics to save. Save yourself some time. With all these subjects I studied money for, over all my life I’ve been studying finance, and then I spent the last decade intimately trying to understand currency and money. And I’m ashamed to say that. I mean, I thought I understood it every year. I thought I was like 99%, I knew it and I wasn’t, I was probably at 80 then 81, 82. And the only really a couple of years ago that I finally understood where I think I’m at 99% finally.

Manda: Oh, I want to talk to you in a decade.

Remzi: But this is the complexity of the language is so complex and difficult. You know, they confuse us. So I would say, yeah, stay tuned, please, you know, join if you’d like what we’re doing. And, uh, and that’s it.

Manda: And let’s see where it goes. Yeah. Brilliant. Okay, so Remzi Bahrami and come on planet, thank you very much for all that you’re doing and for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. Thank you.

Remzi: Thank you, Manda, and for this podcast.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Ramsay for all of the work that’s gone into creating Creditism, and then for bringing it to the world in the way that we can all explore and test out road testing. This is absolutely crucial. So if you have any executive function left after you hold all of life together, then please click the various links and go and join up. Because if people like us test it, there is more likelihood that it will work. And we can iron out the wrinkles before we actually need it to replace the existing system. Having said which, we need it to replace the existing system yesterday, if not sooner. But the sooner we get to it, the sooner we can actually do that. So links in the show notes, please go and explore. And then as always, if you have time to leave us five stars and a review on the podcast app of your choice, that would be really wonderful. And equally as ever, if you know of anybody else who wants to know how we could replace the existing system. Then please send them this link. And beyond that, we will 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 audio production, to Lou Mayor for producing the video, and for managing the YouTube channel.

Manda: To me this week for the transcript. Because Ann Thomas is actually having a holiday. Yay for time away from the keyboard. Huge thanks to Faith Tilleray, who doesn’t have nearly as much time away from the keyboard as either of us would like. For managing all the keyboard stuff. And then, as ever, an enormous thanks to you for being there, for listening, for giving us your time and your energy and all of the things that you bring to the world to help bring a different reality into being. And finally, if you are the person who asked about the Hill in one of the reviews, the hill that I go and sit on is an actual physical hill. It’s within a two minute walk of where I am sitting now. And yes, I have listened to the telepathy tapes. Not all of them, and not in huge depth, but enough. And I don’t think the hill referenced there is our hill. I meet some of our dreaming students there. I meet Lou quite a lot because she’s my dreamy apprentice. I haven’t met many other people that I know of, but we’re ruling nothing out at this stage. So it could be. There we go. That’s it for this week. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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