You know, Herman, I was looking at some recent economic data this morning, and it really struck me how we have become so accustomed to measuring the health of our entire civilization through a single, very narrow lens. We look at the stock market, we look at gross domestic product, and we assume that if those numbers are going up, then everything is fine. But then you look at the actual lived experience of people, the housing crisis that has only intensified through twenty twenty-five, the staggering level of personal debt, and the rising cost of basic existence. You realize there is this massive, widening disconnect between financial value and human value. It is like we are looking at a dashboard that says the engine is running at peak performance while the passengers are falling out of the back of the bus.
It is the ultimate abstraction, Corn. Herman Poppleberry here, by the way, for those joining us for the first time. And you are hitting on exactly what Daniel was asking about in his prompt for us today. Daniel is a long-time listener who clearly has a bone to pick with the status quo. He pointed out that in our previous discussion on impact investing, which was episode eight hundred and fifty-one for those who missed it, we talked about how even the most well-intentioned attempts to fix the system often end up just reinforcing it. We try to use the tools of the market to solve the problems the market created, essentially trying to put out a fire with a squirt gun filled with gasoline. Daniel is asking if we can look past that. He wants us to explore a deeper re-architecture of the financial system that moves away from market-driven dynamics, away from quarterly earnings, and away from public valuations entirely.
It is a bold ask, but a necessary one, especially given the climate reports we have seen in the last six months. If we accept the premise that the current system is fundamentally flawed because it reduces everything—nature, labor, time, and even love—to a price tag, then what does the alternative actually look like? Daniel specifically mentioned that he does not want to just go back to bartering or moving flocks of donkeys around. We are not talking about a regression; we are looking for a modern, sophisticated, post-capitalist framework that utilizes our current technological prowess but redirects it. And I think to start that conversation, we have to look at how we define wealth in the first place. Is wealth a pile of gold in a vault, or is it the resilience and health of a community?
Right now, wealth is defined by accumulation and extraction. It is a linear process. You take a resource, you turn it into a commodity, you sell it for a profit, and that profit is your value. But there is a growing movement called Community Wealth Building that flips that logic on its head. Instead of extraction, it focuses on circulation and generative ownership. The most famous example, which many of our listeners might know as the Preston Model, has been showing some really incredible results lately. We actually saw a study published in late twenty twenty-five that confirmed that the city of Preston in the United Kingdom saw a four percent growth in employment compared to similar cities specifically because they moved away from the traditional market-driven procurement model. They stopped treating their local economy like a leaky bucket and started treating it like a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Let us break that down for a second, because I think the mechanics of the Preston Model are a great entry point into what Daniel is looking for. In a standard capitalist system, a local government or a hospital has a budget for, say, food services or construction. They put out a tender, and usually, a massive multinational corporation wins because they have the scale to offer the lowest price. But then that money immediately leaves the local community. It goes to shareholders in London or New York or Tokyo. It is extracted. The local workers might get a minimum wage job, but the surplus value—the profit—is gone forever.
Right. And what Preston did was identify what they call anchor institutions. These are big, stable organizations that are not going anywhere, like the local university, the city council, and the hospitals. They got these institutions to agree to spend their budgets locally whenever possible. They did not just look for the cheapest price on a global market. They looked for local suppliers, local cooperatives, and worker-owned businesses. By doing that, they kept the money circulating within the city. They turned the economy into a closed loop rather than an open drain. In twenty twenty-four, they expanded this to include a regional community bank that only lends to local projects. This is a direct move away from the speculative nature of global finance. It is finance as a utility, not as a casino.
And that is a fundamental shift in valuation, right? Because they are saying that a slightly higher price paid to a local cooperative is actually more valuable than a lower price paid to a global firm, because that local payment supports a neighbor, pays for a local school, and keeps the local high street alive. The value is social and systemic, not just a line item on a balance sheet. It requires a different kind of accounting—one that factors in the multiplier effect of local spending.
It really is. And it goes even deeper when you look at the ownership structures. One of the things Daniel mentioned was moving away from stock markets and public valuations. In the Preston Model, and the broader Community Wealth Building movement, they heavily favor worker-owned cooperatives. Now, in a cooperative, there are no outside shareholders demanding a quarterly dividend. The value created by the work stays with the workers. If the business does well, the workers decide what to do with the surplus. They might reinvest it in better equipment, or they might give themselves a raise, or they might fund a local community project. The profit motive is replaced by a collective well-being motive. We are seeing this scale in places like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which now employs over eighty thousand people and has its own university and social security system. It is a state within a state, but one built on solidarity rather than competition.
But I can hear the skeptics already, Herman. They would say that this works for a small city like Preston or a specific region in Spain, but how do you scale that to a global level? How do you manage complex supply chains for things like semiconductors or life-saving medicines without a global market and the price signals that come with it? We live in a world of eight billion people; we cannot all be in the same local cooperative.
That is the big question. And this is where we move from local community wealth building into the more radical territory of a resource-based economy or what some people call post-growth economics. The current system relies on price as a signal for scarcity and demand. If something is expensive, we assume it is scarce. But we know that markets are incredibly inefficient at reflecting true costs. They do not account for environmental destruction, they do not account for the health of the workers, they only account for the immediate exchange value. This is what economists call externalities, but in a world of climate collapse, those externalities are actually the most important things.
So, instead of using money as the middleman for value, a resource-based economy suggests we use actual data about resources and needs. And this is where our current era of technology and artificial intelligence actually makes this more feasible than it was fifty years ago. Imagine an allocation system that does not rely on high-frequency trading or speculative bubbles, but instead uses real-time data on resource availability and human requirements to distribute goods and services. We are talking about a global inventory of everything—raw materials, energy, manufacturing capacity—and a direct matching of those resources to where they are needed most, based on human and ecological health metrics.
It sounds like science fiction, but we are already seeing the precursors of this in the circular economy movements of twenty twenty-six. We are seeing businesses move away from selling products to providing services. Think of it as the difference between buying a light bulb and buying the service of illumination. If a company owns the light bulb and is responsible for its maintenance and energy use, they are incentivized to make it last as long as possible and be as efficient as possible. Their value is tied to the longevity and utility of the resource, not the volume of sales. This is the end of planned obsolescence. If you do not make money by selling more stuff, you make money—or rather, you create value—by making stuff that never breaks.
That is a crucial distinction. In our current system, we have planned obsolescence because companies need you to buy the next version to keep their stock price up. If a phone lasts ten years, the company goes bankrupt. But in a circular, service-based model, waste is a liability. This shifts the financial architecture from one that rewards consumption to one that rewards stewardship. And you can see how this bypasses the need for a traditional stock market. If the goal is not perpetual growth but rather the maintenance of a high quality of life within the carrying capacity of our environment, then the valuation of a company is not based on its projected future profits, but on its current contribution to that stability. We are talking about a steady-state economy, which is a concept that has been around since the nineteen seventies but is finally becoming technologically possible.
And that brings us to the concept of the commons. One of the most radical shifts we could make is taking essential life requirements out of the market entirely. We talked about this a bit in episode six hundred and thirty-nine when we discussed universal basic income, but there is an even more profound alternative called universal basic services. Instead of giving everyone a check and telling them to go find what they need on the market—which just allows landlords to raise the rent—the society provides the services directly and for free at the point of use.
Right, so we are talking about free public transit, free high-speed internet, free basic housing, and free nutritious food, alongside healthcare and education. When you do this, you effectively de-commodify survival. If your ability to have a roof over your head and food on your table is not dependent on your participation in a labor market, then the entire power dynamic of capitalism evaporates. You are no longer forced to sell your time for a wage just to exist. You are no longer a cog in a machine that requires you to be desperate to be productive.
It changes the definition of work from something you do to survive into something you do to contribute. And when you remove the profit motive from these essential services, you can design them for efficiency and human need rather than for-profit margins. Think about how much of our current financial complexity is just dedicated to managing the payments, the debt, and the interest associated with these basic needs. If you take the money out of that equation, you simplify the architecture of society immensely. We spend billions of dollars just on the administrative overhead of charging people for things they need to live. In a universal basic services model, that overhead disappears.
I think one of the things Daniel is pushing us toward is imagining a world where we do not just change who owns the capital, but we change what capital is. If we move away from a currency-based system where value is stored in a bank account, could we move toward a system of reputation or contribution? We see some of this in open source software development, which I know Daniel is very involved in. People contribute thousands of hours of highly skilled labor not for a paycheck, but for the benefit of the community and to build their own standing within that community. They are building social capital and intellectual capital, which in many ways are more durable than financial capital.
That is a great point. The open source model is perhaps the most successful non-capitalist system in the modern world. It is decentralized, it is collaborative, and the value created is a public good that anyone can use. No one owns Linux, yet it runs almost the entire internet. There is no stock price for the Apache web server, yet it is incredibly valuable. If we could apply that logic to physical resources—what people call open source hardware—we would be looking at a very different kind of world. Imagine a world where the blueprints for every essential machine, from tractors to MRI scanners, are in the public domain, and local communities have the tools to manufacture them as needed.
But how do you handle the allocation of scarce resources in that model? Because, let us be honest, not everyone can have a house on the beach. In a capitalist system, the market decides who gets the beach house based on who has the most money. If we remove the money, how do we decide? Is it a lottery? Is it based on who has contributed the most to the community? This is where the friction usually starts in these discussions.
That is where the participatory economics model, or Parecon, comes in. It was developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, and it suggests a system of nested councils where people negotiate their needs and their contributions. It is a democratic way of deciding how to allocate resources based on social priority and the effort or sacrifice involved in the work. And again, this is where artificial intelligence can play a role as a facilitator. An AI could help analyze the trade-offs and the environmental impacts of different choices, presenting them to the community to make a final decision. It is not about an algorithm making the rules, but about an algorithm providing the transparency we need to make informed, collective choices. We are talking about a high-tech version of the ancient village commons.
It feels like the transition is the hardest part. We are so deeply embedded in this system that even our imagination is colonized by it. We find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the stock market. But if you look at the history of human civilization, capitalism is a relatively recent invention—only a few hundred years old. For most of our history, we operated on very different principles. We had gift economies, we had common land, we had systems of mutual aid that functioned perfectly well for thousands of years. We are the outliers in history, not the other way around.
And those systems were not primitive; they were often incredibly sophisticated. The problem is that we have been taught that the only alternative to capitalism is a state-run command economy like the Soviet Union, which was just another form of top-down control. What we are talking about here is something much more decentralized and organic. It is about empowering local communities to manage their own resources while using global technology to coordinate on a larger scale. It is about moving from a pyramid structure to a network structure. In twenty twenty-five, we saw the rise of bioregionalism—the idea that our economic and political boundaries should match the natural boundaries of our ecosystems. That is a form of re-architecture that moves away from the abstract borders of nations and markets toward the concrete reality of the land.
I am thinking about the practical implications for someone listening to this right now. If they want to move toward this kind of future, what does that actually look like in their daily life? Is it about joining a credit union? Is it about starting a worker-owned cooperative? Or is it something more radical, like participating in a local time bank where you trade hours of labor instead of dollars?
Those are all great first steps. A credit union is essentially a financial cooperative. Instead of your deposits being used to fund speculative investments that might actually harm your community, they are used to provide loans to your neighbors. It is a way of reclaiming the power of your own money. And starting or supporting worker-owned businesses is another huge piece of the puzzle. When you buy from a cooperative, you are directly supporting a model that values labor over capital. But I think the most radical thing you can do is to start building the commons. Start a community garden, join a tool library, contribute to open source projects. Every time you share a resource instead of buying a new one, you are participating in a post-capitalist economy.
I also think there is a psychological shift that needs to happen. We have to stop equating our personal worth with our productivity or our bank balance. If we want a world where value is defined by human well-being, we have to start valuing ourselves and each other in those terms right now. We have to invest in our relationships, our communities, and our own creative pursuits, even if they do not have a market value. We have to learn how to be citizens again, rather than just consumers.
That reminds me of the work being done on the Genuine Progress Indicator as an alternative to GDP. It actually subtracts things like pollution, crime, and inequality from the total, and adds in things like volunteer work and household labor. When you look at the world through that lens, you realize that a lot of what we call economic growth is actually social decay. If a company spills oil in the ocean, the cleanup effort actually adds to the GDP because money is being spent. That is the insanity of our current valuation system. A disaster is seen as a financial win. A healthy, self-sufficient family that grows its own food is a net loss for the GDP because they are not buying anything.
It is a perverse incentive structure. And it extends to how we value time. In a capitalist system, time is money. Every hour must be productive. But in a post-capitalist world, time is life. The goal is to minimize the amount of time we spend on necessary labor so we can maximize the amount of time we spend on the things that actually make life worth living—art, play, connection, contemplation. It is about moving from a culture of busyness to a culture of leisure and contribution. We have the technology to automate so much of the drudgery; the only reason we are still working forty hours a week is to keep the financial gears turning.
And that is not just a utopian dream. As automation and AI take over more of the repetitive and dangerous tasks in our society, we are going to be forced to confront this. By the end of twenty twenty-six, it is estimated that thirty percent of current administrative tasks will be fully automated. If a robot can do your job, does that mean you no longer deserve to eat? Or does it mean that we as a society have collectively gained a new resource that should benefit everyone? Our current financial system is completely unequipped to handle that transition because it is predicated on the idea that you must work to earn the right to live. We need a system that decouples survival from employment.
This brings us back to Daniel's point about the narrowing of our conception of value. We have this incredible technological potential, but we are using it to optimize for-profit rather than for human flourishing. We are using AI to make ads more addictive instead of using it to solve the climate crisis or design more efficient cities. The financial architecture is the bottleneck. It is the operating system that is preventing the hardware of our civilization from running the programs we actually need. We are trying to run twenty-first-century software on seventeenth-century hardware.
I love that way of putting it. And if we want to change the operating system, we have to start by questioning the core code. One of those pieces of code is the idea of private property in resources that should be part of the commons. Why should a handful of people own the land, the water, and the algorithms that govern our lives? There are models like land value taxes or community land trusts that suggest a middle ground where people can use resources but the underlying value belongs to the community. This is the Georgist approach, which has seen a massive resurgence in the last two years as housing prices have become untethered from reality.
That is a very powerful idea. It prevents the kind of speculative land bubbles that drive people out of their own neighborhoods. If the value of the land is created by the community through the schools, the parks, and the infrastructure they build together, then that value should return to the community rather than to a private developer. It is a way of aligning financial incentives with social outcomes without needing a central planning board. It is a market mechanism used to dismantle market-driven inequality.
And you can see how this all connects. Community wealth building, universal basic services, the circular economy, the digital commons—these are not isolated ideas. They are the building blocks of a new architecture. It is an architecture that is resilient because it is decentralized, it is sustainable because it is circular, and it is just because it is based on human needs rather than market whims. We are talking about a move from a system of competition to a system of coordination.
But let us talk about the risks for a moment. If we move away from market-driven valuations, do we lose the innovation that competition provides? One of the standard arguments for capitalism is that it drives progress because everyone is trying to build a better mousetrap to get rich. If you take away the chance to get rich, do people stop trying to build better mousetraps? Do we just stagnate?
I think history shows us that the most important innovations do not come from the desire to get rich. They come from curiosity, from the desire to solve a problem, and from the need to help others. Think about the people who developed the polio vaccine—Jonas Salk famously refused to patent it. Think about the internet, which was developed in public labs. In fact, you could argue that the current financial system actually stifles innovation by forcing people to focus on short-term profits rather than long-term breakthroughs. How many brilliant minds are currently working on making people click on ads instead of solving fusion energy? We have a misallocation of genius.
That is a fair point. We are wasting an incredible amount of human potential on tasks that are financially rewarding but socially useless. If we had a system that provided for everyone's basic needs, we might see an explosion of creativity and innovation as millions of people are finally free to pursue their true passions. We might get a million more artists, a million more scientists, and a million more community organizers. The "mousetrap" might be built not to make a million dollars, but to save a million lives.
It is about changing the incentive from extrinsic rewards like money to intrinsic rewards like mastery, autonomy, and purpose. We know from psychological research that people are actually more productive and more creative when they are motivated by those internal factors. The current system relies on the carrot and the stick, but we are capable of so much more than just chasing carrots and avoiding sticks. We are a species of makers and problem-solvers. We do not need a stock market to tell us that a problem needs solving.
I also want to touch on the idea of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. We hear a lot about them in the context of cryptocurrency, but the underlying concept is very post-capitalist. It is a way of organizing people and resources through transparent, programmable rules without a traditional corporate hierarchy. Could a DAO be the framework for managing a community's resources?
Imagine a city where the budget is managed through a DAO. Every citizen has a vote on how the funds are allocated, perhaps using quadratic voting to ensure that minority voices are heard. The rules are written in open source code so everyone can see exactly where the money is going. There is no room for backroom deals or corruption. It is a form of radical transparency that could restore trust in our institutions. And because it is decentralized, it is much harder for a small group of people to capture the system for their own benefit. We are seeing early experiments with this in places like the Marshall Islands, which has recognized DAOs as legal entities.
It feels like we are at a crossroads. The current system is clearly failing to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, from inequality to environmental collapse. We can either try to keep patching it up with things like impact investing, or we can start building the alternatives. And as Daniel's prompt suggests, those alternatives might be more profound than we think. They require us to rethink everything from the nature of property to the definition of a good life. It is a total system reboot.
It is a daunting task, but it is also an incredibly exciting one. We have the tools, we have the data, and we have the examples of what works. What we need now is the political will and the collective imagination to make it happen. And that starts with conversations like this one. We have to be willing to look past the current headlines and the market fluctuations and ask what kind of world we actually want to build for our children and for the generations to come. We have to stop asking "how much does it cost?" and start asking "is it worth doing?"
I think about Daniel's son, Ezra, and the world he will be entering in a few decades. Will he be living in a world of constant economic anxiety and environmental instability, or will he be part of a society that has finally learned to value people over profits? That is the real stake in this discussion. It is not just about abstract economic theories; it is about the future of our species. It is about whether we can grow up as a civilization and move past our obsession with accumulation.
It really is. And for those of our listeners who want to dive deeper into some of the specific mechanisms we have touched on, I would highly recommend checking out our back catalog. Episode four hundred and thirty-nine on the new rules of impact investing gives a good sense of the current state of the field, and episode five hundred and eighty-three on the future of governance explores some of those nested council and decentralized models in more detail. We also have a great deep dive into the history of the commons in episode seven hundred and twelve.
And if you are interested in the financial side of the transition, episode five hundred and thirteen on sustainability bonds is a great look at how we are currently trying to bridge the gap between traditional finance and environmental needs. It is all part of a larger puzzle that we are all trying to piece together. We are essentially building the map as we walk the path.
One of the most important takeaways for me is that we do not have to wait for a global revolution to start making changes. We can start by changing how we spend our own money, how we participate in our local communities, and how we talk about value in our own lives. Every time you support a local cooperative or advocate for a public service, you are laying a brick in the foundation of a new system. You are proving that another way is possible.
It is about building the new world in the shell of the old. And while that might feel slow and incremental, the cumulative effect can be massive. Look at how quickly the conversation around things like universal basic income has moved from the fringes to the mainstream in just the last few years. The more we talk about these alternatives, the more they become possible. The more they become possible, the more they become inevitable.
And the more they become necessary. As the cracks in the current system become impossible to ignore—as we see more bank failures and more climate-driven economic shocks—people are going to be looking for a way out. We need to have those exits ready. We need to have models that people can step into that are already functioning and proven. That is why the work being done in places like Preston or the cooperatives in Jackson, Mississippi, is so vital. It provides a proof of concept that can be adapted and scaled.
I think it is also important to acknowledge that this transition will not be easy. There are powerful interests that benefit from the current system, and they are not going to give up their power without a fight. The entire global financial elite is predicated on the maintenance of the status quo. But the current system is ultimately built on our participation and our belief in it. If we stop believing that money is the only measure of value, the system loses its power over us. We are the ones who give the currency its value.
It is a shift in consciousness as much as it is a shift in economics. We have to learn to see ourselves not as consumers or competitors, but as collaborators and stewards. We have to realize that our well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of everyone else and to the health of the planet. Once you truly internalize that, the logic of capitalism starts to look not just unfair, but completely irrational. It is like trying to win a game where the prize is the destruction of the playing field.
It is like we have been trying to drive a car with the handbrake on for the last century. We have all this potential, but we are being held back by an outdated and restrictive set of rules. If we can finally release that brake, who knows how far we can go? We could be looking at a second Renaissance, one where the focus is on the flourishing of the human spirit rather than the expansion of the bottom line.
I think we are just beginning to glimpse the possibilities. From decentralized energy grids that allow every home to be a power plant to open source medical research that prioritizes cures over patents to community-owned housing that ensures everyone has a place to call home, there is a whole world of innovation waiting to be unlocked. And it is a world that is designed for us, not for a stock price. It is a world where value is measured in the strength of our connections and the health of our earth.
Well, Herman, I think we have given Daniel plenty to chew on today. It is a big topic, and we have only just scratched the surface, but I hope this conversation helps to broaden our conception of what is possible. If we can imagine a different world, we can start to build it. The first step is always the imagination.
And to all of our listeners, thank you for coming on this journey with us. We know this is heavy stuff, but it is also some of the most important work we can do together. If you have your own thoughts on post-capitalist models or examples of what is working in your community, please get in touch. We love hearing from you and learning about the experiments happening on the ground.
You can reach us at show at my weird prompts dot com, or visit our website at my weird prompts dot com to find our full archive and a contact form. We are available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. We are also on all the major decentralized social networks now, so look for us there.
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Our music for the show was generated with Suno, which is another example of how technology is changing our creative landscape and making tools available to everyone. It has been a pleasure as always, Herman.
Likewise, Corn. Thanks for the great discussion. I am feeling a bit more optimistic about the future already.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We will see you next time.
Take care, everyone. Goodbye!
