After the Collapse

The dystopian fantasy “Civil War” piqued Steve’s curiosity. His guest is author and monetary theorist Brett Scott.

The 2024 fictional film “Civil War” shows an America that has been fractured into armed factions. It’s not the dystopian fantasy that interests us here, however, it’s the collapse of the currency! In the movie, the US dollar has lost its value, like the fate of Confederate money after the (real) US Civil War.  

With his imagination piqued by the film, Steve asked Brett Scott, author and monetary theorist, to help us think about the dynamics of commerce, currency, and systemic forces in times of societal collapse and global capitalism.  

Brett and Steve look at historical cases like Zimbabwe's hyperinflation and Ireland's banking strike. They discuss barter systems, mutual credit, dollarization, and informal credits.  

The conversation delves into broader themes of pre- and post-capitalist markets, moral logics within economies, and the systemic nature of global capitalism. Highlighting the inadequacy of simplistic elite-blaming narratives, they advocate for understanding economic interdependence and discuss Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a counter to austerity. 

Brett Scott is an author, journalist, and activist, who explores the intersections between money systems, finance, and digital technology. He’s the author of The Heretics Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. His latest book is Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. Find more of his work at

https://alteredstatesof.money/ 

Brett Scott

@Suitpossum on Twitter 

---

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Steve Grumbine: All right, folks. This is Steve with Macro and Cheese. My guest today is Brett Scott. Brett has been with us several times before, and believe me, you want to check out everything he's done. But Brett is the author of Cloud Money, which we've discussed here. And he also is the curator/brains behind the Substack, "Altered States of Monetary Consciousness."

I assure you, you want to check out that Substack. It's always opening up ideas that you probably never thought of, and maybe should think of given the way society is shifting very quickly before our eyes. Brett, thank you so much for joining me today, sir, I really appreciate it.

[00:01:23] Brett Scott: It's great to be here, Steve, good to be back.

[00:01:26] Steve Grumbine: Absolutely. You know, full disclosure, this is going to be a little bit of an experimental conversation. And, for those of you out there who were able to watch the movie Civil War, that movie really, really struck a nerve with me. At first. I got to admit, I was not terribly interested in seeing this movie.

I thought it was going to be a, silly, silly movie, but it turned out to have some quite thought provoking moments. And in particular, I think the part that really grabbed me, that kind of brought me to reach out to Brett, was . . . There was a scene where Kirsten Dunst and her traveling party are on route from New York City to go interview the soon to be assassinated, deposed president of the United States.

And in this fantasy world, they're driving down roads where you've got different levels of war. Some people are just, kind of, living their lives and other people are completely into a, a libertarian hellscape. It is a very interesting dynamic that they lay out here and one that you can viscerally feel if you allow yourself to, as they're driving down the road.

And as they're going down the road, they stop at a gas station. At this gas station, they say, Hey, how much gas can we get for 300 dollars? And the guys laugh and they say about a half of a ham and cheese sandwich. And they're saying, Oh yeah, 300 Canadian dollars. Not 300 US dollars; 300 Canadian dollars. And they're like, Oh, well, 300 Canadian, we'll, we'll fill your tank up for that.

So the Canadian dollar in the United States had its ability to transact, but the U. S. dollar had completely lost its punch. And it reminded me very much of a real historical situation with the Confederacy of the United States, where their currency went, you know, full hyperinflation, full, you know, no confidence. It was no longer being seen as a valid form of currency to transact in.

And that brought me to you, Brett, because obviously you're a guy who thinks about strange things. You take the world and you ponder, what if? And, you know, I'm curious, we're in this phase; I know that, you know, it's a little off. But what happens in that situation? How does commerce suddenly come back in a place that's lost its currency?

[00:03:58] Brett Scott: Well, I don't actually know, necessarily. There's probably many different ways. My family is actually from Zimbabwe. And, you know, in Zimbabwe. Went through hyperinflation and during that time you saw many different reactions people had to that process. And they actually dollarized. Which is would be sort of vaguely akin to Canadian dollarization in the film example you're talking about. You know, where people will take a foreign currency, but they won't take the local one because, I guess, the foreign currencies connected to a political power that remains stable somewhere else. Right? So.

 That was actually one thing that happened in the Zimbabwe situation is that that's how they stabilize it, is that they, dollarized. And then all sorts of other interesting things started happening. For example, the Zimbabwe government started putting out its own, essentially, stable coins of US dollars, you know. But in physical form with what they call the bond coins which were these Zimbabwe government promises for US dollars that are sitting in a bank somewhere.

So that was used. But there's also, you know, like my, um, uncles and stuff were keeping spreadsheets. Almost like creating little, I guess what you'd call a mutual credit systems, where you are just calculating balances to each other and then clearing them later, you know. Which is interestingly something that also happened during the Irish banking strike back in, I think in the seventies, where people formed these informal clearing systems that, so that was going on.

There was forms of barter going on as well, um, economists love these barter myths of money, right, they, they love to say that money comes from barter

or the attempt to solve barter.

Anthropologists have long critiqued this. But interestingly one of the situations where you do actually find barter springing to life, is when you have a bunch of people .

who've already been immersed in a monetary economy and have got used to that way of being; and have developed a reliance on that way of being; and then they suddenly have money ripped away from them and they're actually forced into the barter myth in a way.

I'm not sure how clear this is. That's kind of like what economists did when they invented the barter myth. Was that they took their current society, which was a monetary capitalist economy, and then they engaged in an ahistorical thought experiment where they imagined money being taken out of it.

And they said, what would happen in this situation? Right? And then that's how they invented the barter myth essentially. Right? They were like, Oh, obviously people had to trade goods and services. So, weirdly enough, when you actually do create that situation, you will create barter; but that's, of course, not how capitalism develops. You know, like it's totally ahistorical. So you'll find things like barter are occurring in things like prisons precisely because people in a prison are in a large scale, modern monetary capitalist economy. And then they have money taken away from them. So we can explore that more, but in Zimbabwe, you would find some forms of barter occurring among people who are used to monetary exchange.

But, of course, in the longterm, I haven't actually watched the Civil W ar film, but you'll probably find people splitting into much smaller groups and then forming systems of informal credit between themselves and things like that, too. And, I guess local warlords might start to issue their own tokens. Who knows?

[00:07:12] Steve Grumbine: It's wild because one of the recent works you did on your Substack kind of referred to markets in general. And you said that markets preceded capitalism; and that markets will be a part of capitalism; and markets will also be a part of post capitalism. In this particular case, you know, in the kind of scenario we're laying out here, there isn't really a, quote unquote, capitalism.

 You've got a bunch of individuals trying to get things they need to survive. And there's no real standard for what something costs. It's like, Hey, this is what it's worth to me. What's it worth to you? You know, am I willing to part with this thing at, given whatever it is you're willing to give me for this thing? Is it better for me to hold on to it or should I part with it?

And I'm curious, we can even look at Zimbabwe, for that matter. How does that first market kind of crop up? How does it become a market? How does it go from individuals transacting into actual markets? What is that process?

[00:08:18] Brett Scott: To be honest, I've never been in ancient times seeing the first markets and these kinds of things like gaining power, alright, but, obviously there's probably not, not a singular way that this happens. I guess one of the things to think about, about these question around, you know, capitalism and markets is that when you talk about capitalism, often what we're referring to, at least what I'd be referring to, is a situation where the certain type of logic starts to predominate over other types of logic.

So a particular logic of exchange starts to come to the fore, and starts to dominate over other logics that coexist with it. All right. And this is why you can say you can have markets without capitalism because, there's a certain logic to markets, but they might not dominate the society.

So older societies, for example, like feudal societies and things like that, they have markets around, but they're on the periphery of society. They're not the sort of central organizing logic of the society. Whereas, you know, hierarchical land ownership and traditional hierarchies might be the sort of central point of the society and there's markets around the outside.

 Then when, you shift to capitalism, you're talking about the logic of the market moves to the center of the society rather than the periphery. It becomes the dominating logic. Actually one of the useful frames for people to think about this question comes from David Graeber, who's comes from the world of anthropology, like me.

And David is obviously legendary but he unfortunately passed away a few years ago. He's legendary for his work on critical economic anthropology and dismantling the barter myth and stuff like that. But one of the ways that David would think about an economic system is that there's multiple conflicting moral logics that we always hold at the same time.

All right. And recently, I've been using a sensory metaphor for this. Like, most of us have five senses. And we simultaneously have five senses, right? And you can't really imagine one without the other, right? And similarly, we all actually have different conflicting or sometimes harmonizing or moral logics in an economy. And they kind of exist simultaneously. So for example, all of us will have, like, a side of us that does calculated exchange. But we are also going to have a side of us that looks for humanitarian impulse or a kind of egalitarian impulse simultaneously.

So David Graeber, he would split these impulses in an economy. He had three big categories would often talk about, which is everyday communism. All right. So everyday communism is a moral principle where if you see somebody who is in much greater need than you, you're going to help them provided that what they're demanding of you, isn't too great. And that you have the ability to actually help them. Right? So very good examples of this kind of stuff are like, somebody asks you for directions in the streets. Like, you're never gonna see this person again.

You're not gonna get anything back from them. But they're in a situation of need; they're not asking too much from you; and you're in a position to help. So you just do it. This is how like huge amounts of our economic system works like this, right? People just doing stuff for each other and not expecting anything back. But of course, if the person was asking a lot of me, then of course, maybe the situation changes. A different moral logic starts to come into play.

So then there's the sort of second big body of moral logic comes as, like, reciprocity. Which is to say, Hey, if you're asking a lot of me, or if we're in a sort of equal situation, I can expect some kind of return thing from you, you know? Another example of sometimes usable at this is, like, an airport. You're in an airport, right? And you're in the queue to get into the security. And, let's say, you've got two hours before your flight has to go.

 And like, you're not stressed. You're going to get through easy. And somebody comes running up behind you and they're really stressed and they're sweating and you can see they're late for their flight and they say, Hey, can I please go past? And then most people in that situation, unless they're total assholes, will say yes. They'll say, okay, fine. I understand. And that's everyday communism, right? that's a such as person seeing somebody in need and saying, I'm actually able to help you. Okay. Go. Cheers.

You're never going to see that person again. You're not going to get anything back from them, all right? If, though, you are also late for your flight and you're also stressed and then somebody comes up behind you and says, please let me past, it's a different situation. You're going to say to them now, Hey, actually, I'm also late. Why should you go in front of me? Because I'm also late. We're both in the same situation, we're equals, uh, you don't get to just jump past me. Right?

In that situation, it is possible that the person could try to induce you into doing something by offering you some kind of exchange to say, Oh, I'll compensate you. I'll give you 20 bucks if you let me go past. And that might work, you know, so that that's the sort of situation of, you know, a reciprocity sub situation. But there's also a third big body of situations which are hierarchy based. So for example, imagine there's a security guard on the side and he's like, Hey, both of you step aside for this elderly person who's going past, right? Neither of you gets priority yet.

And I'm just going to dictate this thing. Hierarchy actually plays out in many ways in an economy. For example, in your Civil War situation here, your elites would work on these principles through like things like patronage, for example. So, like, patronage in old economies is a hierarchy based system where somebody who has developed power for some reason, whether it comes from like charismatic power or their physical violence, they're able to wield or whatever it is, you know.

Imagine you're like in Mad Max, where there's this kind of like depraved sort of like warlord characters who get up to a high point. The thing that happens to people in hierarchy situations is that they start to dispense patronage to their followers. Right? They give, essentially, gifts and they're not really expecting a gift back. That it's not an exchange. They're not saying, Oh, I'll give you something and you give something to me.

It's actually a way of holding political power. It's a patronage system. You distribute largess to your followers, but you can also demand things of them at certain points without them having no recourse. So it's like what Kings used to do. They'd be like, you know, give me tribute. But then they could also like grant you things at will. Right?

These are like hierarchy based systems, or in a modern capitalism that would be, you know, like, Bill Gates takes his employees out for dinner and he says, Oh, this is on me. Right. Nobody in that situation is like, Oh, I have to pay Bill Gates back, offer him a dinner now, right? Because it's like, Oh, this is a person in a situation of hierarchy patronage, essentially. So these like working with these different bodies of moral logics becomes interesting when you think about different economies, because capitalist economies they tend to accentuate certain parts of that.

The ideology of capitalism always says it's reciprocity. So it'll say, oh, it's all based on equal exchange But, in reality, all these sort of hierarchy principles start bleeding into that this massive unequal distributions of power. But you'll find these interesting hybrids going on in a capitalist economy. I'll end now, but.

[00:15:21] Steve Grumbine: Yeah.

[00:15:21] Brett Scott: You will find market processes, AKA people engaging in different forms of exchange in all types of societies. The question though, becomes, is that the dominant logic?

Even in hunter gatherer societies when which exchange definitely isn't the dominant logic, you still will be forms of explicit reciprocity going on and so on.

[00:15:41] Steve Grumbine: So back to your hierarchy statement, obviously, within the space that I typically stay in, the MMT space, the object here is, is that, you know, the state as the, quote unquote, currency issuer, creates markets by creating buyers and sellers of goods. By instituting a tax. But that feels way down the runway. It also doesn't necessarily feel inevitable. The idea that you get to a certain point where an obligation payable only in the currency to keep that currency working and to create the exchange, if you will, the buyers and sellers of goods through the imposition of a tax to create that kind of magnet, if you will, the kind of priming of the pump to get that quote unquote economy moving.

That is what we always talk about now because that's a description of kind of what we have today. How far off would something like that be in the collapses that occurred? I mean, that really doesn't hold sway unless you have the ability to actually enforce attacks and have the structures. Once society collapses, that kind of institutional arrangement can't exist. Won't exist.

So what does that look like? Obviously, because this is what we have today, a lot of people think that it's just inevitable that that's how society would be developed, if you will, to be structured and organized; economic activity, economic life based on a state as a central, you know, lead in the hierarchy. And it's needs coming first, and then all other things stemming from that. In this case, there's no state anymore.

[00:17:25] Brett Scott: Yeah. I mean,

[00:17:27] Steve Grumbine: does that work?

[00:17:29] Brett Scott: Again, I'm improvising and riffing here, but... there's a few elements to probably balance off against each other. On the one hand, the MMT story around essentially money as an extension of political power at some level, actually chimes with the sort of hierarchy-based stuff that you see in, essentially, warlords who are able to demand tribute.

Okay. So tribute is a big part of patronage politics and historical societies, right? So you demand tribute in order to, essentially, not be violently killed, or else, to be on the line for getting distributed grants and patronage by the ruler, right?

You see this a lot in like, feudal societies where there's like a king, but then there's all these like dukes and stuff around, right? And the dukes aren't strictly fully controlled by the king, but they kind of all give tributes, right? They send stuff from their lands to the king.

And then the king will then grant them things. And there's this whole kind of weird, like hierarchical structures whereby that's in play. And this is, you know, from an MMT perspective, you'll start to see these hierarchical structures. They can issue tokens, and demand the tokens back rather than, well, it can issue tokens in exchange for goods and services and demand the tokens back rather than directly extracting goods and services from people.

So there's a sort of mechanism for getting real resources to the state without having to sort of directly extract them, in the forms of, sending your troops to go and take grain from people. Does that make sense?

[00:18:59] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, absolutely. I guess in your micro sense, the way you were talking previously, these small little warlord factions, small little communities, interest groups, localities, whatever. Maybe they begin doing something along this line?

[00:19:15] Brett Scott: Yeah. so like, you know, if you're looking at early money systems and, quote unquote, early civilizations is what old historians would call this, which is essentially talking about 6, 000 or so years ago, which is actually a tiny section of human history. But it's the most focused upon one, you start to get, you know, settled states and agriculture and all this kind of stuff.

And that's where you find essentially large scale surpluses emerging in the society, which enables elites to exist. Right. Where you can have quote, unquote, a leisure class, a bunch of people who just do administration and stuff like that without actually doing much work. And so this is where you start to find the MMT story around state structures that start to underpin money systems, right? And writing is associated with this.

But you also got to look at energy systems. Like, one of the things that scales systems up is new energy, right? So, vast modern capitalist economies can get so huge because got huge energy sources, right? Whereas old hunter gatherer societies don't have big energy sources.

So the interesting question with your sort of Civil War  example will be that actually you'll have a collapse of a state, but you won't necessarily have the total collapse of the energy sources. People will still have access to certain modes of energy sources. They'll still know about technologies of various sorts.

So there'll still be the building blocks of large scale society sitting around. But you'll have the political structures imploded in some kind of way. Right? Which is slightly a different situation to old states where they didn't have access to fossil fuel energy and they didn't have access to like, telecommunications, and things like that.

So, the Civil War example is quite an interesting one to think about because you've got a kind of a between a sort of old pre feudal system. But it's very futuristic or modern because it'll have all these fossil fuel energy and stuff as well. It becomes an interesting question as to, could you start a political organization that quite quickly reestablishes itself in that situation?

 I actually haven't watched Civil War. I guess I should have watched the film. I don't actually know what the state of the society's infrastructure is and their like energy sources and that kind of thing.

[00:21:17] Steve Grumbine: They've got all the same things that you expect today. It's almost as if it happened now. And so you figure, yeah, those things are there, they're just strewn with dead bodies, of course, manning them, if you will. And there's a lot of death and destruction, and there's a lot of people that are in like football stadiums, they're all packed on the ground in tents, or...

[00:21:40] Brett Scott: What's been the cause of the death, exactly?

[00:21:43] Steve Grumbine: Rogue people coming through with weapons and just killing people randomly. In fact, there's one guy if you remember did you see Breaking Bad?

Uh, I've seen parts of it.There was one guy in there that became the crazy guy and he would kidnap them and he would keep them it was almost like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. He's just a lunatic. Well, this guy plays a little bit of a what you would envision a standard MAGA lunatic looking like, militia guy. And they've got a hole dug with about 60 bodies just laying in there, they keep throwing lye on it, just to keep the smell down.

And this group comes up there and they're like, Oh my God. And they ask where are you from? He goes, we're Americans. He says, yeah, that, I hear you. You're Americans, but what kind of Americans?

And the one guy says, well, I'm from Arizona or something. Okay. And you I'm from Colorado. Okay. And you, he goes, "Ch, ch, ch, ch ch, ch, ch . . .' He goes, "ch, ch, ch, ch what?" He goes, "China." And he goes, "Oh," and he blows him away. Just kills him right there on the spot. Doesn't even, no more talk.

[00:22:45] Brett Scott: The dystopian imagination, at least in my experience of like, Mad Max, this kind of, it's a massive genre. And I guess it springs out of a modern anxiety around the fact that people at some level realize that society is quite precarious because we depend on so much stuff, right? So we have incredibly high dependency on infrastructure and energy and these things. And, if those go down, you find yourself with a that is dependent on something it no longer has. Right? And I suppose that's where all the fascination and imagination of, like, collapse comes from.

Incidentally, we could discuss this proper dystopia, but if you look at things like the Black Death in Europe and stuff, these are actually sometimes tragic events with, huge amounts of people get killed. But they sometimes lead to these like economic booms because suddenly the labor force is so much smaller, right?

So like workers can certainly extract a lot more. They get displaced from the land, for example, but they can end up actually commanding much higher wages because there's fewer of them, right? So there's a whole bunch of economic historians that look at stuff like the Black Death and things like that. But it would be an interesting question in the sort of long term, with the Civil War scenario here.

With that sort of chaos and violence that continues. Or there's some kind of stabilization occurs and people actually discover that they have access to a bunch of technology and stuff, but there's far fewer of them. And so, actually, they can have quite abundant lives potentially. Again, I haven't watched the film, so I don't actually know if that's the case. But that would be a hypothetical possibility that you actually have, weirdly, some kind of boom that occurs after, I guess from an MMT perspective, MMT often focuses on how much productive capacity is there and how much is it being used, right?

The real resources in the economy. So it's true that your human population gets destroyed, that reduces your real resources and what your actual capacity in your economy. But on the other hand, there might be a bunch of unused things that could be reactivated or, perhaps, agricultural land lays fallow for a bunch of time, and then suddenly it can actually be used again, and so on.

So it'd be kind of an interesting scenario for a re-blossoming of new types of economies. I should probably watch this film, shouldn't I?

[00:25:01] Steve Grumbine: You really should it I promise you you're not gonna sit there and put it up for awards necessarily but if you're watching it to think

[00:25:11] Brett Scott: Sorry, I was going to ask what's the rest of the world doing at this time while America's collapsing?

[00:25:16] Steve Grumbine: Exactly. So you've got the Western forces, which are made up of California and Texas. So they have created de facto governments. And they are functioning just like what you would envision the US empire behaving like. They've got war planes, they've got a full blown military coming through and wiping out the existing order. So, in a sense, there is an opportunity for rebirth right there, in this case, with these Western forces. Rebuilding it in their image, whatever that you know, would look like.

They never get that far. Cause really, all it does is get to the point where they get to the President and they want to say, why did you use nuclear weapons on your own people? Right? That's kind of the whole point of the movie is to ask this President. And then they kill him. Right there. There's a spoiler. Sorry about that.

But the movie is really more, kind of, a bunch of little vignettes, even though it's one story, of different scenarios that could play out along that roadway.

And one particular community is still operating as if nothing's happening. They're still using regular dollars. They've still got shops. Everybody is still living their life as if nothing, they're like literally putting their fingers in their ears and go, la, la, la. I can't hear you. Uh, while on the top of the roofs, you've got snipers sitting there patrolling. But the rest of the town is literally living as if there isn't any of this stuff going on.

So they don't even care whether the federal government is taxing them or not. They know that they use dollars for buying that shirt. And so they buy the shirts with that dollar and you know.

[00:26:50] Brett Scott: That an interesting little plot twist.

[00:26:54] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, yup.

[00:26:55] Brett Scott: I don't have the studies on me, but, there's like some quite interesting stories I've seen from say places like Nigeria where, you know, counterfeits are often quite widespread. And, you know, technically a counterfeit is, you know, something you're not supposed to trust because that isn't a state credit. It's a parasitic token that's mimicking a state credit, right?

So again in the MMT framework, it's not going to be redeemed it's not going to be pulled back by a state for taxation, right? It's not going to be able to free you from your existential debt to the political authority. and yet people have been known to just use them and not care. To say, well, you know, in the, in the day to day life, we don't actually necessarily mind because we already have this economic interdependency.

 Quite interesting thing to think about with like large scale money systems, I sometimes think about them with a vertical and a horizontal dimension. Let's see if I can explain this without confusing people.

So the vertical dimension of a large scale money system is the issuers, right So I often imagine like a state and also the commercial banking sector. Imagine them on a vertical access, like pushing money down, alright, and sucking it back up again. And that's the logic of a money issuer is they kind of push it out and pull it back, push it out, pull it back, right?

But on the ground, on the horizontal dimension, is human beings who are interdependent. All right, like, we rely upon each other to get goods and services from each other, right? And we're often passing around those vertically distributed tokens, horizontally between ourselves. So for example, if you imagine a state pushes out money and you end up with it. But you pass it to me, and then I pass it back to the state. That was like a vertical issuance, then a horizontal transfer, and then a vertical redemption back upwards. All right.

And that's often happening in monetary systems. You have these different types of payments that are going in different directions. But often when you speak to people and you ask them to imagine money, they can only picture the horizontal dimension. If you ever go to a person, you say to them. Explain to me how money works. They'll very, very frequently use these horizontal descriptions. They'll say things like, Oh, the reason why it works is that because the shopkeeper will accept it for me and they know that I will accept it from them.

 So they have this sort of like, I don't want to be but a kind of folk narrative, that somehow we've all collectively agreed to somehow horizontally use these between each other and we've sort of like fantasized that this, this object is a fictitious substance of value and that's why it works, right?

So most people, when they're giving these kind of folk narratives of money, don't think about the issuance layer or the vertical part of it, right?

But, weirdly, it is hypothetically possible that , actually, if your structures of interdependence between people are strong enough for that horizontal dimension, they actually can sometimes forget about the issuers.

So as in the case of the counterfeiters in Nigeria, you know, people could actually pass them around. Like, I know it's a counterfeit, but like, who cares? I still depend upon getting stuff and, you know, so some of those horizontal dynamics start to occur there. But you could also imagine in your Civil War example here, perhaps people are like, we seem to be aware that the government is collapsing or has collapsed, but we're still going to go through the pretenses of using its tokens and normal interdependence commerce between ourselves.

I don't know if that actually resonates with what actually happens in the film, seeing though I haven't seen it.

[00:30:33] Steve Grumbine: You know what? It doesn't matter because the film is just our fodder, as a means of laying this out, you know?

[00:30:38] Brett Scott: It's a very interesting question, actually, using films, especially science fiction films, to see how they treat the question of money. Because often they don't really have an account for how it works in films. This is especially the case in science fiction because you'll find these, like, intergalactic credits and things like that they have, and there's never any explanation of, like, who issues these credits? Why do people use them? You know, Star Wars has this kind of stuff, you know, and you

Battlefield Earth did a great job of it. I mean, I, I don't know, did you read Battlefield Earth, Isaac Asimov, Battlefield Earth.

uh, I haven't actually, but I definitely know it.

[00:31:15] Steve Grumbine: There's a piece, the character's name is Johnny Good Boy Tyler, and he becomes a slave for these aliens that come in and basically take over these planets, of course steal all their natural resources and then go off and leave and go to the next planet kind of thing. Well, Johnny Good Boy Tyler led a revolution against these aliens.

And as they're reconstituting society, it goes through the entire process of how they, they basically, I could almost feel the libertarian card coming out because I felt the gold standard erupting. And I felt all the standard sound money things coming out. But I didn't know that at that time, at that time, that was perfectly fine for me, and I was like, yeah, okay, cool.

But as I'm thinking about it now, there are attempts to do this. And I guess to some degree I'm thinking about it as well, because in your Substack, you're talking about money is life. You know, life is money, and this kind of, economic life.

[00:32:16] Brett Scott: Not necessarily money is life, but sorry, carry on.

[00:32:19] Steve Grumbine: No, the economics is life or however you're framing that. I don't have it in front of me, so I'm just trying to go top of mind. But when you think about it like that, what I found fascinating was all the different relationships that had nothing to do with exchanging a piece of paper or a coin. There were all these other relationships that have to be accounted for as part of this dynamic.

And, you know, as you're rebuilding a society or as you're going through something like this, all those synapses, if you will, in this neural system, maybe some of them are still connected. Maybe some of them aren't connected. Maybe you have to reattach them. Maybe you have new ones you're going to attach to. , It's an opportunity for looking at the chalkboard as a clean slate? Or maybe - just how would you rebuild that?

And, I think there's a pretty long reaching history that shows where there's a void in power, there's always someone that comes in to fill that void. So there's going to be power dynamics as people that have that gene in them that push them to want more and, so forth. There'll be natural leaders that erupt, and so forth. But how does play in?

[00:33:30] Brett Scott: I think the way to start thinking about a question like that is to just go back to very basics, right? Because, this is what economic anthropology is good at. What's the foundation of every economy ever, regardless of its form, they often have the same foundations, right?

You have, essentially, interdependent human beings drawing from the earth. I mean, that's pretty much it, right? That's what an economy is. And that can take many different forms and have many different scales and different styles of interdependence. But the basic anchoring reality is that what we call an economy is, basically, a bunch of people who are linked together who can't survive without each other. And who will collectively engage in some form of collaboration, which doesn't necessarily have to feel collaborative, right? But to collectively provision for themselves.

And of course, a modern capitalist economy, it feels incredibly cold and disassociated. Like you don't see who you rely upon. You'll have breakfast cereal, but you have no idea who provided it to you. But you're still collaborating with that person, right? That person is enabling you to survive.

So that's modern capitalism is a very, very sort of diffuse, fluid style of interdependence. Whereas of course, it's tiny, small scale hunter gatherer bands have got a very tight, highly visible, small scale form of interdependence. Things like a tribal society, bigger than like a hunter gatherer society, but not nearly as hierarchical as like, a peasant society with, you know, rulers and stuff like that.

So there's, there's lots of these different forms of economic interdependence. But we can always just go back to the basic building blocks. The first building block is the sun, always. Basically, without the sun, there's nothing, right? The sun provides all the energy for the plants; without that, there's no ecosystems; without that, there's no life. The sun also provides all the fossil fuels in the forms of, like, old creatures that have died and become fossilized. Basically, the sun is the main economic actor, right? And then everything else is subsystems of that.

So essentially, this question is not only about imagining a collapsed society, but you could also use this thinking to measure, okay, right now, if I wanted to build a different type of economy, what would I have to do?

You'd have to, you'd have to re-engineer like, the scale and the style of relations between people and like the relationship to the resources or the ecological systems that you are engaging with. And there's not necessarily any single hard boundary between different systems. Our actual economic system is a bunch of, like, we call it capitalism but it's a bunch of, sort of, subsystems going on there. And those subsystems can have different dynamics and so on. And they are all connected up.

So this is really the question. I'm guessing in a post collapse society, at least in the immediate interim situation, you'll have lots of fear. Probably very disrupted networks and things. So those types of warlord characters, the sort of, like, quintessential Mad Max kind of character, who's this person who can use fear and violence to essentially gain some kind of order.

They're very prevalent in our imaginations. Whether those characters would prevail or continue really depends, right? At some point they also depend upon a bunch of people below them, like keeping them together, right? Um. And those people can start to rebel; they can chuck them out at some points.

 So, you know, it'd be actually a very interesting thing to study for this is actually like gangs, how gangs work. Because gangs, essentially, are parallel economies or parallel states in many places. And they often have slightly different, they're different systems of, of, going on. They're using patronage. They're using all sorts of stuff to, like, keep themselves afloat. So I imagine there'll be lots of that dynamic. But, you know, no gang leader can be too violent because, actually, at some point they alienate too many people, right? They, they have to sort of selectively use violence to keep enough of a psychological edge over people.

But if they use too much, they will get destroyed, right? This is kind of things that like Machiavelli used to say. You know, in a sort of book The Prince, which is all about, you know, you can dominate people to some extent, but don't try to dominate them too much because they'll, screw you up. [Laughter] I was just riffing, I don't know. I haven't really

[00:37:42] Steve Grumbine: No, but see, this is exactly it.

[00:37:45] Steve Grumbine: Like, there is a bit of a romantic idea of, , taking down the state and then, you know, rebuilding it in your image. And I think there's a huge delta there that people just don't look at.

 It's more of a figment of their imagination and with the way things are, I mean, my God, for the last year we've witnessed in live form, the real world genocide of the Palestinian people. We've literally watched it happen on TikTok and everywhere around. And for me, I'm, I'm 55. It's the worst thing I've ever seen in my 55 years on the planet.

I keep trying to find something else that comes close and I, can't. And as I'm watching this in real time and I'm watching the student protesters, for example, rising up, and being beaten down by, you know, fascist police forces and these very, very hierarchical structures that do not value the feedback of the people.

And you think about people as they go off into their quiet space and they think to themselves, man, I'd sure love to have a revolution. I'd sure love to bring an end to this despotic behavior. I don't want my nation funding a genocide anymore. I don't want this. I don't want that. And, I know I find myself frequently saying, what?

What agency do we have? We can't vote our way out of this. You got, you know, everybody saved democracy voting for Biden. That's what we were sold in America. And what did you get? You ended up getting a cold war with China, a sort of hot war with Russia through proxies through Ukraine. And now you've got a burgeoning world war three by trouble in the Middle East that, you know, has just gone from horrible to outrageous.

So people are feeling kind of lost. And then you have the specter of Donald Trump rising from the ashes once again. And so there's a lot of fear in general; and people are panicking. Some of it rightfully and some of it absurdly. But, nevertheless, people have a lot of fear that things are breaking down.

I mean, you've watched the multi-polarity that is occurring right now with the rise of the BRICS. And to what degree that is an actual challenge of US hegemony is, you know, we can debate that all week long. But the reality is, is that people are seeing this and things are changing; and they're fearful and most of their fears are, you know, they're just fears. Some of them, though, have, some oomph behind it. And there's a shared belief system. And that shared belief system, whether it be rooted in reality or just rooted in belief, makes them behave in different ways.

And so, part of my goal in doing this conversation was to just sort of paint a picture. Just let people start thinking about what it really means to lose the structure that you have today and to have to kind of reimagine what that interim period looks like. It's like a black box that nobody thinks about, you know what I mean? They're imagining, I have this revolution and tomorrow morning, we're back to Starbucks. You know what I mean? Like, I don't think that they understand.

[00:41:22] Brett Scott:  That's a very common thing though, in alternative economy imaginations is wanting the outcomes of capitalism without its structures, right? So, you know, that's a very common thing. People say, oh, well, you know, we can have this. Take down hierarchical state power; but we still want, like, goods and services.

Actually, look, weirdly, the conservative libertarians are the most notorious for this, right? They're like, oh, we still want all this nice stuff, but we don't want any state authority. It's like well You do realize that global capitalism is totally underpinned by state structures, right?

[00:41:54] Steve Grumbine: Absolutely.

[00:41:56] Brett Scott: You know, so they have these sort of fantasies about that sort of decoupling of large scale capitalist markets from large scale states. They don't want to actually bite the bullet and say, what would actually happen? Although occasionally you do find, sort of, really ideologically kind of hardcore types of libertarians who are prepared to accept the consequences, right?

I had this hilarious interaction, a couple of years ago at a music festival. And got into this debate with this, like, really hardcore libertarian. And she had moved to Mexico to the gang lands because she liked the fact that there was a competing state. She liked the fact that there were warlords challenging the power of the state to try to create their own state because essentially that's what the gangs are, right?

They're a parallel state. And they actually often have more authority than the states. So this is, essentially, what's going on with the situations is that, you know, you have these competing forces. And, she actually had gone to, like, Mexico. She had, sort of, romanticized, like, living in the gang lands. And I was like, okay, well, I sort of semi respect this kind of - at least you're prepared to accept the consequences of your belief system, right?

 This is a bit of a tangent right now, but it's a very, very interesting scenario going on right now with El Salvador. Because El Salvador, of course still is kind of touted by all the Bitcoiners as being their paradise because the president there endorses Bitcoin.

But one of the most fascinating things, and disturbing things, and well, contradictory things the president has done; he's done a massive crackdown on the gangs in El Salvador, alright? And if you want to analyze what's happening there, is that, you have two warlords essentially who are fighting, right? So , the big issue in lots of Latin America, especially because of like the war on drugs and the US market is essentially the drug gangs got so powerful that they have become a parallel state, they're a competing state.

So you have two states in the same place trying to compete with each In the case of El Salvador, basically, Bukele was like, okay, we're going to have one state from now on, rather than two states. And so he went on a hardcore, like, takedown of including you know, human rights violations. Like extrajudicial. You know, just imprisoning people without, having any evidence that they're actually gang members, but he certainly crushed the system.

And, actually, now he's been, that's one of his most popular things, right? Because, essentially, he's created a single warlord structure. And he's also the champion of Bitcoin. Which now has become a very fascinating problem for the libertarians in the Bitcoin space. Where, essentially, this strong man who has established a proper state to dominate over the other state, is also this guy who champions the supposedly stateless coin.

That's a little aside there, but when we're thinking about this stuff, I suppose you've got to think about the coevolution of all the different parts of a system. This gets complex with capitalism because, on the one hand you could say, markets are underpinned by state structures. Now, if they're often actually induced by state structures, and if you're looking at sort of chartalist monetary theory, this is a big part of it, right?

Like, a state or a proto-state comes in and actually establishes a stronghold; and then it can start to issue its tokens. And those tokens, and you can imagine, there's this sort of the vertical dimension. This issuance process by a powerful entity that can pull them back. But then the horizontal dynamics of the sort of the everyday use of those tokens can actually expand markets that can, actually, make the system expand outwards.

You can have far more commerce because of these widely distributable tokens that people know are linked back to a distant political power. So you can actually expand markets massively through these state structures. Right? But then what happens, uh, as an effect of that is that sometimes the states, themselves, that underpin those markets get captured by the very markets that they underpin, right?

So global capitalism now, actually, has started to transcend the power of the nation state. Many of the world's most powerful capitalists, they rely upon all the states, in general, to underpin all the contracts, but they've kind of transcended, right? They actually operate on a different scale and, more generally, actually, states can't really control the capitalist processes that they've unleashed.

All right. So you'll start to see these political leaders who, ostensibly, are kind of like in control of the system. But, really, they often not. Right? They often given this position by the system itself. Right. So, so this becomes an interesting dynamic, which is like, okay, fine, you imagine, you fantasize, by toppling this leader and somehow that's going to make the system change.

But in reality, the leaders often are sort of, like a mushroom  that's popped up because of the mycelial networks.

[00:46:24] Steve Grumbine: Yes.

[00:46:25] Brett Scott: Right. So yeah, I mean, if you, starting from complete scratch, you can, in a totally like, you know, apocalyptic scenario where all the structures have been destroyed and you have some kind of like totally new society, I mean, you could imagine recreating small scale hunter-gatherer dynamics and small scale tribal dynamics.

But if you're sitting in either the ruins of that system or you're within it still, a lot of people in alternative economy circles, and I know when I say alternative economies circles, I have a particular meaning. Which is people who sort of fantasize about breaking out of capitalism and living in a different type of society.

Right? So, there's different branches of that. But often what they do is, they imagine a scenario where they're not in capitalism. And they're like, well, let's think about this as if we were starting from scratch, in a way. But that's a very unrealistic way of thinking about it because you're not separate from capitalism.

So when you're thinking about building an alternative economy, you have to be seeing yourself as a subsystem of a much broader system. And you're trying to form certain types of internal autonomy; but you're not really autonomous from the mainstream system. Anything here spur your imagination, Steve?

[00:47:33] Steve Grumbine: Yes. So this is really the final piece of this. And this is something that I've been dying to ask you about. So it, kind of, takes everything we talked about and it looks at, okay, so, in real life today, we have no evidence that the voting that we do has a discernible impact on the policy space that our governments take on.

And, largely, because of the capture of these industries that have exceeded beyond the very nation states that gave birth to them, you know, and, that undergird them. you're looking, like, well, how the hell do I have agency in the system? How can I, fundamentally, make a change to my life; to the people I care about lives; what does my vote get me?

And, kind of piggybacking off of what I said, you know, everybody was told we got to vote, vote, vote to save democracy. We got to vote for Biden because Donnie Tiny Hands is such a whatever. But in reality, I asked people that voted that way, I'm saying: did you mean to vote for genocide? Because Joe Biden has full-funded a genocide in Gaza and Palestine.

So the extent that you believe you have a democracy and, everything that I've learned about modern money systems has been based on, we just have to source the vote. We just have to source the vote. If we source the vote, then we can make it rain. We can do whatever. But that, fundamentally, is naive and it doesn't really have the kind of truth behind it based on, specifically, things that you just brought out. Knowing that capitalism, even though it is a construct of the state, has grown beyond the control of the state at this point, it's become its own thing.

And so within that space, I frequently thought about a lot of things like, Ben Wilson and Scott Ferguson and their Uni program. The idea of having a alternative currency and using it through the university systems. You and your mutual credit conversations that we've had before and other alternative means. How do you build a parallel construct so that you're able to build power In a site of a system that no longer grants you power?

I mean a Princeton study was done a few years back that showed public opinion and voters' sympathies or voters desires have a discernibly zero effect on public policy. And this was done by Princeton. I mean, it's like real literal studies have shown that there's like zero democracy.

And then you see articles in The Guardian that say, you know, the United States, who is the dominant empire of today, it's not a democracy in any way, shape or form. That it's really an oligarchy. And the idea of, regular working class power is kind of a fairy tale that we tell ourselves so that we can find a way to survive in the system. And, and it's a means of manufacturing consent and so forth.

So I've oftentimes thought about, well, what if we took these alternative approaches to money? What if we thought about how these systems work? Build parallel systems so that we can build dual power; so that we can impose a real genuine threat to the state in terms of, not a revolution per se, but more of a, Hey, we're organized. We know what we want. We didn't stutter.

This is what we need. And because as of now, people go, they get that little sticker they put on their forehead that says, "I voted," and they feel like they've done God's work. They pat themselves on the back and break their arm in the process of doing it.

But nothing fundamentally changes whatsoever. I'm curious, in this next kind of iteration, what a parallel system might look like that would offer up people a chance to have hope. A chance to build power against this, so that they have a voice. Because I, genuinely, don't see the electoral system yielding the kind of outcomes people are desperate for.

[00:51:26] Brett Scott: Yeah, sure. I mean, that's a lot of stuff there. Maybe one sort of meta thing to say is that, okay, it's true that under a vast scale of corporate capitalism that's underpinned by militaristic states who will, you know, don't care about human life and will do whatever is the most politically expedient for them.

You know, for example, the, the Gaza genocide. So they'll do these things that are based upon, sort of, these systemic power considerations, right? Rather than like actual, what's the right thing to do, right? So that's true. And that sometimes leads to the questioning of what, you know, democracy means and so on.

I think that's important. But also bear in mind that there's going to be a lot of countervailing political opportunists who are waiting to exploit that disillusionment. All right. So for example, new forms of authoritarian capitalism, which are still capitalist systems, but they have a new, like, flavor to them. Exploit!

That is the very thing you just said there, right? They'll exploit the fact that people are feeling like their voice isn't heard. And they'll be like, yeah, democracy is a sham, and so on. I see this every single day, right? Especially, for example, the YouTube sphere where you find all these people who're, sort of, apparently quite critical of global capitalism. And they, actually, often have a bunch of like progressive talking points, right? About, land grabs and corporate power. But then they often end up implicitly supporting various forms of authoritarian capitalism without realizing it. Right.

And so they, themselves, become quite naive. I guess while it's an important point to have a lot of disillusionment around the democratic process, don't let that be co opted by the authoritarian forces that want to turn that into their own political opportunism, right?

I guess one thing I want to say is that a lot of the analysis that I do is very systemic, right? By which I mean, it's about the fact that there isn't really anybody who controls the system. So, for example, we say something like, the nation state initially kickstarts markets. Or like, you know, political powers initially kickstart markets. But then markets start to have more power than political systems and start to capture them.

And then we imagine, for example, like powerful capitalists as being the ones who are in charge of that system, right? So the ones who've captured the state. But, actually, lots of powerful capitalists don't perceive themselves as having any power either, right? They often say things like, well, if I don't do this, somebody else will. If I don't take this particular, uh, arms race of like AI or this arms race here, like somebody else will out compete me.

Right. So capitalists have this weird situation where they have a lot more power than the average person, right? If you think about the big tech billionaires and so on, they have more power than the average person. But they often, themselves, are subject to all these anxieties and fears that if they don't do certain things, they're going to be out competed and destroyed essentially, right?

And they will often point to, for example, like the financial sector. They'll say things like, well, you know, if we don't produce our returns for shareholders, then we'll be punished by the financial market. So then you're like, okay, maybe the power resides with BlackRock and Fidelity and these big fund management firms.

Are they the true powers in the world? because you know, they're the ones who fund the corporations. And then the BlackRock and Fidelity will be like, Oh, we are, we just operate on behalf of the pension funds. The pension funds are the ones who give us the money to invest in the corporations. Right. You go to the pension funds; the pension funds say, Oh, but we just act on behalf of people who are doing their retirement savings, right? And you go to those retirement people who are the savings. And you say, you know, are you responsible for this? And they say, of course not. I'm just a worker in the economy.

So when you start to trace the lines of global capitalism, you see one of the incredible power of this system is precisely that there is no single person that could actually ever really, within the sort of capitalist sphere, no single person who actually claims responsibility. But then the second big thing to say is that, while that's true; while you can see capitalism as this kind of, like, headless systemic force that kind of haunts our society in many ways. Um, it's not the only force in the world. All right.

There are other countervailing forces that exists at the same time. So for example, when people get together to say, we demand something different. And we demand something beyond just a market solution. Or we demand a healthcare system; even though it's not technically profitable; or something like that. They're asserting a different set of values and a different force. All right.

So you can build counter power to capitalist processes, right? If you think about the capitalist system as being like Pandora, like a spirit that's been released by Pandora's box, you can't have countervailing spirits that start to fight it, right? Like it's, not a done deal that it's the end of, days, right?

So that's how I would tend to analyze these things. You know, building counterpower is one of the things people do. And I'll try to tail this off here, but there's a bunch of different strategies people historically use when they're trying to do the countervailing thing. Like, anti-capitalism is one of them, should I go through all these approaches?

[00:56:23] Steve Grumbine: Yes. If you - No - Absolutely,

[00:56:26] Brett Scott: There's so many things that, because like how this relates to democratic systems and so on, it's like a massive topic. But, you know, in general, when you're taking a person who's facing a economic system that either makes them anxious or, like, makes them feel desolate or impoverishes them. Or, they can see it's destroying the ecological systems.

There's different responses you can have, right? One of the most common responses is actually people who try to use the system to fix itself. This is the most dominant political approach people do is they'll say, Oh, well, let's just to try to do sustainable capitalism. Let's try to do inclusive capitalism and so on, right. And, let's try to use the process as a profit accumulation to solve its problems.

Um, interestingly, you'll see people like Trump actually attack this kind of thing now. They're like, ah, these goddamn ESG people. And you think about ESG. What is ESG? I mean, I was involved in sustainable finance and stuff like back in, 2013 and those kind of times, and ESG wasn't popular then.

It was like this marginal thing in that side of the financial sector, where the big fund managers that say, oh well, you know, maybe we should think about, you know, not, like, wrecking the ecological systems through our investment processes. And they, sort of, would have these ESG conferences. And now that the term ESG has become bigger, right? It's like, okay, maybe we should try to, you know, make it profitable to protect the world and have these market processes that, don't destroy the underlying basis of markets. Right?

So that's the ESG world that people like Trump, actually part of the whole thing is like mobilizing their base against the sort of paternalistic forces of the ESG elites. So that's like an interesting thing that's going on within that paradigm and that paradigm is basically like people who want to use capitalism to fix itself. That's that kind of thing, right? Then you have historically, of course, like, anti-capitalism.

Which is just , you know, screw the system. And weirdly in, like, left-wing circles you'll find two, actually, completely opposite versions of that. Which is, you have the ones, the people who want to pull away back from capitalism. So they say, put it back in its box. Like, constrain it and stuff, right? And then you have the accelerationists; who, like, massively accelerated, so it, like, destroys itself. And those are two, like, you know, left-wing traditions of anti-capitalism.

 And then, you know, things like MMT will be, you know, sort of this more kind of managerial approach. Which is to say, Hey, we have the power to steer the system. The system is underpinned by nation-states. And, actually, we can use nation-state power to get better outcomes in the system, right? And that's often what the MMT community is doing. And sometimes MMT does actually seek into the more, kind of, radical anti-capitalist approaches. You can, there's definitely, you'll find Marxists who are in the MMT world as well, but not always, right?.

And then, in the kind of, like, the alternative economy world, with alternative currencies and things, you often find people would have slightly more, kind of, like, these anarchist-y ideas of, like, well, you're not going to change the system. But try to, like, build out small alternatives on the side. Or create, like, little counter powers that will, sort of, balance it out to create resilience.

 And , of course, you'll have things like the crypto worlds where they imagine, they fantasize as entirely separate systems. Albeit in the crypto world, they're totally linked into the mainstream system but they love the fantasy of the tech.

[00:59:34] Steve Grumbine: I love that meme. There's a meme out there where there's a guy in one of the green suits where, you know, you're doing the green screen technology? And so they got the guy in the green suit, holding the guy up with crypto because he's ultimately the fiat guy holding up crypto. I think it's just an amazing meme.

If you can envision a dude in a green screens outfit. Fully green. Holding him up. She seems invisible. But in reality, it's all backed by the state. It's still the same damn system.

[01:00:01] Brett Scott: I mean, we've talked about things like Bitcoin before and stuff -

One of the interesting things, actually, if you are thinking about alternative economies, is you actually have to deal with the fact that there is a tradition on the political right and the conservatives of imagining, fantasizing a different economy. But often comes from a very different place. Because their background imagination is different. They often imagine that the problem is there's not enough capitalism. So like that, So they'll be like, oh, we don't really live under capitalism now. We live under, you know, some kind of like socialist system, and, you know, the big tech companies are actually like socialists.

 So they fantasize like a kind of straw man version. And then they try to live out an imagined ideal type. I don't know if you know, if you come across this concept of ideal types? It comes from, sort of, sociology, I think. Like, ideal type. For anybody who hasn't come across this concept, it's the perfect ideal version of your system. The pure, ideologically pure version. It's the of the fantasy of your system rather than the reality. Then there's the actually existing system, right?

So the ideal type of capitalism in libertarian communities is that they imagine it's a sort of flat system of equal exchange. And everyone's voluntary and they walk around and they engage in mutual contract and everyone benefits from this process. And this is the ideal type, right? So when they see the fact that, for example, giant corporations dominate the actual system, they fantasize. They say, well, that's not really capitalism, right? And you go, you say, well, in that case, capitalism never existed, right?

Because what we call capitalism is the state underpinned process where about vast market players, like, create these huge markets. But in the Bitcoin world and in the crypto world, they heavily rely upon the ideal type. Or the ideal vision of capitalism. And they say things like, Oh, well, we want to build this pure capitalism in the future; totally detached from the state foundation. And that's where, for example, visions like the network state and stuff are starting to come out. I don't know if you've come across that, but that's the sort of new incarnation of conservative libertarianism with a, sort of, technological spin on it as this, you know, this concept of this crypto -blockchain backed network state structures where, people can set up.

 And if you had to get a bunch of people into a room and say, imagine an alternative economy; they would give you wildly different ideas based on their background vision of what the existing economy is, right? Libertarians give you many ideas of what they want for as an alternative economy. And they'll imagine that it's quite revolutionary. But it often will be based on these totally, sort of, delusional ideas of what's, actually, already going on.

And so, whenever I'm doing alternative economy stuff, it's always fascinating because sometimes I've run workshops and things like that. And you'll see that totally different people arrive, and sometimes they're very conservative. Sometimes they're very like left-wing. And sometimes they, weirdly, will end up agreeing with each other because these sort of different background visions can sometimes weirdly harmonize. You'll find people all wanting localism because they're like, actually, our system is too large. And it's destroying traditional values because it's too large.

And then, like, you know, an anarchist also wants localism. So they're like, Oh, I agree with you on that. And anyway I'm yeah, kind of, like, riffing you. I'm imagining that in an actual civil war scenario he's talking about there, people will be drawn together, not by ideology, but by practical circumstance, right? So, you know, one of the things you'll find in very large scale European and American societies, you have these massive intellectual debates, right?

Because people are sitting in these huge capitalist state structures that, essentially, are already established. So you have this whole intellectual class who debates the stuff; and that's where you can have this incredible disagreement. Because people are operating on this very intellectual realm. Whereas when people are thrown into a common scenario together, doesn't really matter what they subscribe to as a political position. The person could be like a hardcore, self- described libertarian, but if they are suddenly in a situation where they're having to interact with a bunch of people who don't subscribe to that, that's not going to matter.

They'll have to find ways to survive together. And this would be quite an interesting thing to think about the scenario. right? So, imagine, you know, back in the kind of feudal times in the UK or, like, tribal times. People aren't sitting around having like ideological debates about the nature of the economy. They're just like, we're in a particular practical situation and we have to survive.

[01:04:13] Steve Grumbine: I do have this final question for you, Brett. Piggybacking on everything, cause, I mean, you're ASoMoCo Substack is fantastic. Folks, but seriously, if there's a Substack out there to subscribe to let it be Brett Scott's. It's really, really good. It's thought provoking. But obviously there is a common thread, whether it be in left-wing circles. Whether it be in left-wing libertarian, and even to some degree, right-wing libertarian, there is like a common thread, to some degree, of dissatisfaction with what is happening.

I mean, when you hear the state saying discernibly, factually, incorrect things. That they're literally standing up there saying things in state of the union addresses, and saying things that are meant to galvanize everyone in a certain direction. But it's, like, that's just simply not true. It's just straight up not true. People genuinely have a difficult time swallowing the gaslighting. And so finding purpose in life, finding a means of feeling like they have agency in this space.

It's easy to laugh at people like that because. You know, Oh, you're just such a naive person. Of course, you just got to vote for whatever and do whatever. That's what we do. Cause that's what you do. But I, genuinely believe, and I think you nailed it a little bit, and I hate to use gangs as the paradigm for this, but to some degree, you think of unions, even. The idea of having a union of people that come together and think about a means of holding the state accountable. Knowing full well that governments today are deploying militarized police forces, the kin to the greatest standing armies in the world, now.

I mean, we're not talking about Mayberry RFD, where you got Barney Fife twirling a baton. You're talking about guys in full blown, Desert Storm, militarized Kevlar and weapons and stuff like that. The state is very oppressive. It's very authoritarian. People are looking at, they're like saying, I don't like this. I don't want surveillance. I don't want all these things.

 What? I can't vote my way out of it? Because every time I think I did, I end up still back here. It's like, no matter whether I vote right or vote left, I just keep ending up back here. I feel like it's one of those mazes that you just never quite get out.

You always end up back at the same spot.

[01:06:34] Brett Scott: Sure. Yeah.

[01:06:35] Steve Grumbine: So what would you, as a parting word, and this is kind of where I leave this. In terms of monetary systems. In terms of this kind of economic life that we're all living. And it's what's driving so much of our daily behavior that we don't even realize it. Right?

What would you say as a means? And I get it. This is riffing. This is a thought exercise. But what would you say to people like, I mean, I don't want to just laugh at them because I'm, I'm one of them. I feel that urge. You know, when I heard them say, I'll veto Medicare for All. I wouldn't pass Medicare for All for nothing. Knowing full well that they're lying about the debt and lying about deficits and lying about these things and manufacturing an austerity mindset amongst the people.

It just makes me want to rage out and makes me want to do something. And there's no pathway to doing it. I mean, I'll go. I'll stand in line in my gray drab suit and punch the ticket and, say, vote for D. Vote for I. Vote for R. Vote for whatever.

But ultimately, I'm still sitting back and things that I would have never asked for, never wanted never even considered worth my time, will suddenly be the soup du jour up there. And it's like clear that it's not coming from me; whatever message. I voted for him, yet nothing they're saying sounds anything like what I'm thinking.

What would your response be to people that you know are in this kind of alternative economic mind, alternative social order? It's, easy to mock them.

[01:08:13] Brett Scott: Bear in mind, I sit for, like, a long time in this space and stuff, so I've seen many different styles. And I empathize with people, you know, when they have their different types of fantasies or whatever it is about escape. And that's a very natural response people have. I don't have any judgment. People develop their political positions out of circumstance often, and they're just responding to something in their environment, right?.

And most people aren't specialists in trying to analyze the kind of storm system of global capitalism, right? I try, but that's, you know, it's hard. Thing that sometimes can help to calm a person, is to do this sort of move towards the systemic analysis approach, So if you're looking at a storm system like, hurricanes approaching. We don't really ascribe morality to it per se We're just like, well, it's happening, this thing is hitting us, right? When we're looking at economic systems, though, we tend to often ascribe lots of morality, especially to the various individuals who find themselves in positions of power, right? So we're like, Oh, this person does this thing, and they're the reason for this kind of thing there, right?

 And I'm not saying that isn't the case. But it's useful having a countervailing mindset at the same time, which says, actually, this person doesn't really have that much power. Actually, they're just a sort of pawn in a systemic storm system. it certainly helps me. I mean, I'm not sure how everyone feels better when they see that. But, for example, if I go into YouTube and I go into, like - if I type in something like - cause, you know, what is money or something like that. I'm going to find a bunch of, like, ranting, talking heads.

And they're like, let me tell you the reality of money; and this guy here from Goldman Sachs is like, join the US government; and then he then started this unit share; and he is corrupt; and du-du-du-du-duh. They do all this basic small scale human level analysis. They imagining these, sort of, solo individuals who are somehow in control of the system. And this is where conspiracy narratives basically come from. And if you want to understand the conspiracy narrative, it's just like, imagine you're like in the 1600s and a storm hits a village and then you blame it on witches rather than blaming it on atmospheric physics.

I mean, that's like a very conspiracy mindset. You're like, there must've been people behind the storm. All right, must be them, it must be those women over there. Cause look at them. We don't like them. That's basically it. Conspiracy narratives tend to, essentially, ascribe human agency to systemic processes. So they're imagining witches, or they're imagining, you know, Jewish people, or they're imagining quote unquote, the bankers, or whoever it is. The global elites. You can choose your sort of small group of people you imagine to be in control. And that can shift.

And of course, when somebody does feel anger and helplessness, they often gravitate towards those narratives, right? And especially when there's a bunch of these opportunists out there who are very, very good at stringing those narratives together. Including on both the left and the right, you'll find conspiracy people on both the left and the right. They all like know how to work this game, right? And often they do it because their minds work like that. Lots of people literally think about the world as a series of individual human connections that, like, decide things.

So anyway, what I'd say, this is quite a long spiel here. But, it's worth moving away from that mentality. Not to, like, completely move away from it, because, of course, there are individual human beings who make a difference. , They do have power, but we shouldn't ascribe them too much power. All right. Actually, often things that are going on in our world have to do with systemic processes that are beyond our control.

You know, there's a massive accelerating system of global capitalism. It's always trying to do things. It's always trying to expand. It's always trying to accelerate. It's always trying to automate regardless of what each individual person wants. And often, political figures will find themselves caught in a situation where if they don't act in those interests, they, essentially through various systemic processes, will get excluded and pushed out.

So just being aware of that's very important. And then I'm going to say something controversial, which is, if you want to be able to, sort of, think clearly about the situation is you've got to, kind of, accept that, you know, if there is a systemic storm battering you, it's better to accept that it exists than to try to deny its existence.

 To say yes; we're, actually, totally caught in a system that nobody's in control of. And accepting that is a better starting position than denying that, right? 'Cause then once you accept that, you can start to think more clearly. It's like, okay, this is a situation. We have a runaway system with a bunch of political elites who, sort of, are captured by the very same runaway system. What are we going to do in this situation? How can we build concrete forms of counter power, little like bastions of outposts against the storm system, as it were, right?

And I think that's, um, probably the way to go. And that's probably much more progressive because the alternative narrative, which is, Oh, there's a bunch of elites who control everything and they're the ones we've got to take down. That very, very, very easily gets captured by regressive forces in society. All right. And often, unfortunately, those guys are coming dressed up in left-wing colors. , they're like, Oh, you know, it's the global, the global capitalists. I see, I increasingly see a lot of very reactionary, regressive, left-winger sort of personalities emerging who specialize in whipping up these fears and spinning these narratives about these types of, like, human forces that are destroying your life.

And I think it's very important to take a bit of a deep breath step away from those characters. And to say, okay, if we want to think about this clearly, I've come repeating myself now, but we're in this, like, giant structure. It's got massive forces that are beyond our control. Let's start to build some like counter-power.

And , actually, MMT isn't actually one of those types of attempts, right? You have people who's saying, the systemic forces are towards things like austerity in various ways; or, like, cutting funding to here. We're going to act against that and do something different. So, I don't have all the answers.

[01:14:06] Steve Grumbine: That was great, man. I look for real. For folks that don't understand, normally we go into these conversations and there's a much more concrete pathway to the end. In this case, though, I didn't want to have a concrete path. I wanted to walk in the door, accepting whatever came out and, and really being able to look behind the curtain. And kind of ponder and think without some fear of being laughed at or ridiculed. And just sort of ask some weird questions, some tough questions. And think about it with somebody such as yourself, who has got that anthropological view. And look at where the frozen cave man came from, so to speak, and kind of look at it today.

And you know what? I got exactly what I was hoping for. I, you really took us down a number of paths. And they were all paths that are worthy of more consideration, more conversation. And I, really, kind of like the way you brought it back to this isn't a runaway train. It's not necessarily led by this guy with a long nose and long pointy fingers, and so forth, that it has kind of exceeded that place. It's beyond the individual. It's the system. It's a systems approach that you need to review and think about to really understand the world you're living in.

And so I think this was fantastic. I know that you feel like you were riffing, but your riffing is fricking amazing. Well, good. I'm glad I was so worried. You'd be like, what the hell? But this is, this is good for me. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for the time. Brett.

[01:15:39] Brett Scott: Thanks for the thought experiments and stuff. It was

[01:15:43] Steve Grumbine: Yeah, what the hell? It's a little different, right? Tell everybody where we can find more of your work.

[01:15:48] Brett Scott: My Substack is ASOMOCO. The website for that is, you know, www. dot A S O M O dot CO. Or else you could just find me like Brett Scott. You can type it and, you'll get my stuff. That's where most of my stuff that you'll find now. Maybe I'll have some new books coming out. My last book was Cloud Money. Yeah, I'm kind of not really using Twitter or X that much anymore. I used to be quite like on there. I am on there. You can, you can find me on there, but I've redirecting my energies more towards the Substack space because it's a better quality of conversation I tend to find there.

So yeah, that's where I'm kind of directing people right now.

[01:16:25] Steve Grumbine: Awesome. So we're on Substack too, folks, by the way, realprogressives.substack.com. And our Macro N Cheese podcast is there. So you can go there on Saturday mornings, which is where this podcast will live when we release it. By all means, check it out. It's on all your favorite podcasting platforms.

Brett Scott, thank you so much once again for joining me today. I appreciate it.

[01:16:47] Brett Scott: Yeah. Thanks so much. It was great.

[01:16:48] Steve Grumbine: Absolutely. All right, folks. My name is Steve Grumbine, a host of Macro N Cheese with the nonprofit Real Progressives. On behalf of my guest and myself and Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

---

EPISODE EXTRAS

• Cloud Money (Book by Brett Scott) [0:55] 

• Substack - Altered States of Monetary Consciousness (ASoMoCo) (Brett Scott’s website) [01:02] 

• [04:43] Stablecoin: Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies whose value is pegged, or tied, to that of another currency, commodity, or financial instrument. Stablecoins aim to provide an alternative to the high volatility of the most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), which has made crypto investments less suitable for everyday transactions. [from Investopedia] [04:43] 

• [05:15] Irish bank strikes : "The Irish bank strikes between 1966 and 1976 were three strikes of about a year's total duration which closed down all the clearing banks in the Republic of Ireland. The strikes provided economists with a unique opportunity to study the functioning of a modern economy without access to bank deposits.[1]" [From Wikipedia] [05:15] 

• Civil War (Movie) (A thought experiment for the conversation) Civil War is a 2024 dystopian thriller film[6] written and directed by Alex Garland, starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, and Nick Offerman. The plot follows a team of war journalists traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C. during a civil war fought across the United States between a despotic federal government and secessionist movements, to interview the President before rebels take the capital city.  

• Breaking Bad (TV Show) ("Crazy guy," analogy) Breaking Bad is an American crime drama television series created and produced by Vince Gilligan for AMC. Set and filmed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the series follows Walter White (Bryan Cranston), an underpaid, dispirited high-school chemistry teacher struggling with a recent diagnosis of stage-three lung cancer. White turns to a life of crime and partners with a former student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to produce and distribute methamphetamine to secure his family's financial future before he dies, while navigating the dangers of the criminal underworld. 

• Battlefield Earth (Book by L. Ron Hubbard--not Isaac Asimov) (Economics depicted in science fiction) Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 is a 1982 science fiction novel written by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. 

• David Graeber (Anthropologist) Author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and other books.  (Critical economic anthropology, Barter myth) [09:41] 

• Mad Max (Movie Series) (Dystopian imagery) Mad Max is an Australian media franchise that centers on a series of post-apocalyptic and dystopian action films. [13:54] 

• The Prince by Machiavelli (Book on political power) The Prince  is a 16th-century political treatise written by the Italian diplomat, philosopher, and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli in the form of a realistic instruction guide for new princes.  [37:32] 

• El Salvador and Bitcoin (Political and economic situation) El Salvador became the first country in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, after having been adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021.  [from Wikipedia] [43:10] 

• ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Investing (Controversies and strategies within capitalism) [57:12] 

• Desert Storm The Gulf War was an armed conflict between Iraq and a 42-country coalition led by the United States. The coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: Operation Desert Shield, which marked the military buildup from August 1990 to January 1991; and Operation Desert Storm, which began with the aerial bombing campaign against Iraq on 17 January 1991 and came to a close with the American-led liberation of Kuwait on 28 February 1991. [1:06:03]